It was 2006 and my spouse and I were seated in the waiting room of my obstetrician's office. I was expecting our first baby and just there for a normal check-up. It was an early morning appointment, so there was only one other patient in the waiting room with us. I recall noticing her because she looked young and she wasn't noticeably pregnant (like patients who joined me in the waiting room usually were.) The assistant called her back by name just before they called me back.

As my spouse and I sat in the exam room and chatted, we heard the OB/GYN open the door to the exam room right next to us and greet the woman who had been in the waiting room with us. Then, we very plainly heard an exchange between them about how the girl had engaged in some unsafe practices and now was worried she had contracted an STI. My spouse and I looked at each other horrified that we had been privy to information that was positively none of our business. We also did not like the fact that, if we could overhear them as plainly as if they were sitting in the room next to us, then they obviously could hear us and our confidential exchanges as well.

Before the obstetrician came into the room, I tried to find out why the sound was carrying so well between the two rooms. I discovered that the space had been retrofitted to fit the needs of this obstetrician's practice and that the wall between the two rooms came right up next to a window. There was about a centimeter of space between the window and the wall and that was at the bottom of the noise leak.

Besides it being a glaring breach of HIPAA laws, this type of predicament could possibly effect a doctor's relationship with and care that they give to a person. If the patient discovers that what they tell their doctor is not necessarily confidential, they could be more reluctant to give out information that could be pertinent to what care they should be receiving. The trust between a client and a doctor should be fostered and protected and this kind of disregard for the confidentiality of what is shared could be damaging to that.

A simple solution for the predicament would be to outfit the space with sound masking technology. With the addition of some barely noticeable background noise in each room, it would not have been nearly so easy to hear conversations in other rooms.