345
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
345 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
87129 readers
2596 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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”.
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.
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.