Four years ago my husband and I were waiting in the lobby of my doctor's office. Pregnant with our first child, we were there for a prenatal exam. It was one of the first appointments of the day, so there was only one other woman in the waiting room with us. Not only did she stick out because she was the only other person in there, but because she looked very young and did not look as if she was pregnant. She was summoned back to the exam room right before they called me back.

As my spouse and I sat in the exam room and conversed, we heard the obstetrician open the door to the exam room beside us and greet the woman who had been in the waiting room with us. Then, we very clearly heard an exchange between them about how the woman had engaged in some hazardous 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 knowledge that was surely none of our business. We also did not like the fact that, if we could overhear them as clearly as if they were seated in the room next to us, then they obviously could hear us and our confidential conversations as well.

Before the obstetrician came into the room, I attempted to find out why the noise was carrying so well between both rooms. I noticed that the area had been retrofitted to fit the needs of this midwife's practice and that the wall between both rooms butted up against a window. There was about a half an inch of space between the window and the wall and that was the culprit of the sound leak.

Besides it being a definite breach of HIPAA practices, this type of issue could potentially effect a physician's relationship with and care that they give to a client. If the patient notices that what they tell their physician is not automatically 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 patient and a physician should be fostered and guarded and this kind of disregard for the confidentiality of what is shared could be detrimental to that.

A simple solution for the issue would be to outfit the office 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.