RFID's adoption by the healthcare industry made progress this week with the announcement by AMTSystems of new pilot programs for its SurgiChip product. The SurgiChip, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in November, uses an RFID-based verification system to "prevent wrong-site, wrong-procedure and wrong-patient surgery." Industry analysts estimate that between five and eight surgeries per month are performed in which an incorrect part of the body is mistakenly operated upon. While only a very small percentage of the total number of monthly surgeries, those few mistakes can cause dreadful and traumatic outcomes.

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reporter's notebook To many, implanting radio frequency ID chips into humans is the face of impending Orwellianism. But to be honest, it looks like a mosquito bite.
Joseph Krull, an executive at Flanders, N.J.-based Virtual Corp., had a doctor stick an RFID tag from VeriChip under his skin on Jan. 10. The residual blemish amounts to a small red dot.

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California lawmakers are joining the national debate on the merit of incorporating electronic identification devices in driver's licenses, student IDs and passports.
A bill that would put strict limits on California's use of such devices in all state-issued identity documents is making its way through the state's legislature and was approved this week in a 6-to-1 vote by a senate judiciary committee. It's the first bill of its kind in the nation, said its author, state Sen. Joe Simitian.

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