The American National Standards Institute has approved the Health Industry Business Communications Council’s (HIBCC) proposed set of new standards concerning the use of RFID tags in tracking medical products.

The new standard, called ANSI/HIBCC 4.0, calls for products to be labeled with 13.56 megahertz high-frequency tags instead of ultra-high frequency tags, which were found by a June 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association to interfere with the operation of electronic medical equipment. HIBCC officials assert that the smaller reading range offered by the 13.56 MHz tags will be less likely to cause interference.