Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Speaking of that, hospitals still use tons of POCSAG (pagers) and splatter medical everything over those. Course it's illegal to listen due to a bullshit 1987 law... but trivial to do so with a RTL-SDR.

One idea my nefarious side had was to get the med records of individuals and get the address's house cost, and send scary calls/text/messages shaking relatives down with scare-calls. (Or, get the info and get in league with overseas scammers who masquerade as the hospital, and take a cut from that. Would be relatively risky free.)

Obviously I wouldn't do that. But it would be trivial to do.

(Long story short, pager infrastructure needs destroyed.)



I've had a career in hospital IT and operations. The challenge is finding a replacement that is as reliable and accessible as a pager. The replacement communications products out there have some nice features (managing on-call scheduling, interfacing with electronic health records, etc), but it only takes a handful of outages to get everyone to switch back to pagers "just in case."


Well, I was being rather absolutist when I said to destroy pager infra.

It should be messages like "Code red to room xyz with patientID #####"

That would remove anything really actionable.

Whereas I was seeing over FLEX: full name, address, room#, child abuser status, why they're there, medicines. It was fucking stupid, like fuck no.


I'm sure Oracle nee Cerner would develop Pager Millennium if you asked nicely enough.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: