The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found the wireless systems send out radio waves that can interfere with equipment such as respirators, external pacemakers and kidney dialysis machines.
RFID involves tiny tags that are used to track all sorts of products. Its use is on the rise in healthcare as it helps to identify patients and reveal the location of equipment.
The latest research, conducted at Vrije University in Amsterdam, tested the effect of holding one active (with a battery and able to transmit information continuously) and one passive (powered by the electromagnetic field of the reader) device by moving it around the room while researchers assessed electromagnetic interference (EMI) on the medical devices.
Researchers tested 41 medical devices, including ventilators, syringe pumps, dialysis machines and pacemakers. In all, researchers conducted 123 EMI tests, and 34 EMI incidents were recorded.
Some 22 incidents were considered hazardous, that is the RFID devices caused a mechanical ventilator to turn off or external pacemakers malfunctioned.
Two incidents were significant that included an inaccurate blood pressure reading or an alarm wrongly going off that might divert attention from the patient.
The passive signal resulted in a higher number of total incidents (26 out of 41, or 63 percent), as well as more hazardous incidents (17). Some hazardous incidents happened when the RFID was more than 10 inches away.
Researchers suggested that the implementation of RFID in the ICU and other similar health care environments should require on-site EMI tests in addition to updated international standards.
