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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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I used to work at a hospital and I have experience with doctors who firmly believe that their comfort and convenience tops HIPAA and anything else. I had to file several violations for doctors who wouldn’t stop using SMS instead of their pagers. Every time their excuse was “I don’t like the pager, it’s old.”There is a nonzero chance that this doctor didn’t even continue thinking about the consequences beyond “but I need to have the latest thing”.
Most pager systems are actually huge privacy violations. $20 for a software defined radio dongle and a few minutes will give you plaintext pager notifications for hospitals across your state.
Did a project on it when I was breaking into cybersecurity.
There are encrypted paging setups, but there’s a lot of places still running legacy.
Are there alternatives outside of paging. I know the risk of texting sensitive information, but I figured there'd be a more modern system than paging.
By the time I stopped working there they were using an app that had an E2E encrypted connection to the medical records system so they could actually even get test results and such as texts. The instances I was describing happened in the early days of iMessage right as we were starting the upgrade of the pager system. Most of the problem doctors had recently finished residencies or internships at hospitals that had already upgraded.
If this was in 1992 ok, valid point. Anyone currently forcing doctors to use pagers when secure alternatives that allow for better communication exist deserves pushback.
Eh, I still have a pager and so do a lot of other people in hospitals. It's mainly because most hospitals have locations that eat cell phone reception.
Wouldn't stop using SMS instead of their pagers for what? My office still has pagers, but that's mainly because we're in the hospital's basement and don't have very good reception.
The rest of the hospital generally works off of sms for messaging when a patient is roomed, or for being on call. I don't know how you could break hipaa using a sms in place of a pager.