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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 husband and I sat in the exam room and chatted, we heard the midwife open the door to the exam room next door and greet the person who had been in the lobby with us. Then, we very plainly heard an exchange between them about how the patient had engaged in some unhealthy practices and now was worried she had acquired an STD. My husband and I looked at each other horrified that we had been privy to information that was definitely 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 doctor came into the room, I attempted to find out why the sound was carrying so well between both rooms. I noticed that the room 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 centimeter of space between the window and the wall and that was at the bottom of the noise leak.

Besides it being an obvious breach of HIPAA practices, this type of issue could conceivably effect a physician's relationship with and care that they give to a person. If the patient observes that what they tell their doctor is not necessarily confidential, they could be more hesitant to give out information that could be relative to what care they should be receiving. The trust between a patient and a doctor should be fostered and guarded and this kind of disregard for the confidentiality of what is shared could be detrimental to that.

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