According to a number of experts, the FCC’s recent decision—which will allow unlicensed devices to share the same wireless spectrum as healthcare monitors—is going to place new burdens on hospitals and may put patients at risk.
Meanwhile, some of the FCC commissioners concede that technical concerns do remain, but say hospitals will have recourse if they encounter interference.
The disagreement between the FCC and the American Hospital Association, which is leading opposition against the decision, revolves around the solution of creating buffer zones around hospitals in which unlicensed devices would not be authorized to operate.
First of all, to obtain a buffer zone, hospitals will need to register their pertinent devices with an official database, which they have never been required to do in the past. That will require coordination to press hospitals into signing on.
The second issue is the size of the buffer zone. The FCC has granted protected zones of 380 meters around hospitals, but the AHA has found that size to be inadequate in tests with General Electric Co., a major patient monitor manufacturer.
The FCC’s solution: hospitals that encounter interference can request that their buffer zones be increased. But not even all of the commissioners themselves are buying that as an answer.
A statement by FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly notes that, “Although the item states that the FCC can take ‘immediate corrective action upon determining that there is harmful interference,’ there doesn’t appear to be any process in place to ensure that the Commission’s finding of interference will be timely.’”
Furthermore, a statement by Commissioner Ajit Pai acknowledges that hundreds of healthcare institutions told the FCC that the protection zones would be inadequate, and rather than dismissing those concerns, he agrees that they are valid.
Among the issues is that the FCC’s technical analysis assumes that hospitals with wireless medical telemetry system (WMTS) devices are no more than three stories tall, even though the commission’s report shows the majority of hospitals with WMTS devices are taller.
Pai also acknowledges the testing that showed interference to WMTS systems at three different hospitals from a device operating at the power-levels and distances proposed by the Commission.
He goes on to concede that, “many have argued that the commission’s technical analysis is too optimistic, to put it mildly.” He lays out the additional arguments which include that the FCC’s analysis is based on 600 MHz devices performing orders of magnitude better than industry standards, and that it makes unrealistic assumptions about the separation distances between licensed and unlicensed devices.
Pai concludes by noting that while these are credible objections, he believes there has been meaningful effort to accommodate the concerns. But it places the burden for managing resolutions on the parties involved.
Pai points to a portion of the order that states that, “If a licensed wireless provider believes that an unlicensed device is causing harmful interference to its licensed service, the relevant parties must work collaboratively and in good faith with the licensed provider to address the issue. Our hope is that questions of interference can be resolved by the relevant parties on a voluntary and expedited basis, so that the licensed provider won’t necessarily have to ask for, and then wait for, the FCC to act.”
That may not read as a reassuring message as far as support and protection.
According to the statement by AHA executive vice president Rick Pollack, “We remain highly concerned that if the rules adopted today are left unchanged, patient safety could be compromised. We will continue to work with Congress, the FCC and device developers to seek a remedy that puts patients first.”