Hospitals' dirty little secret: Caregivers sharing clinical data via personal phones

Hospital caregivers typically bring their own mobile devices to work and use them to share clinical and care coordination information other members of their multidisciplinary care team. It's a practice that screams "HIPAA violation." Much of this information is transmitted via text messages or multimedia SMS. This can even include images. This might be fine if the messages were transmitted on a Wi-Fi VoIP network within the hospital's firewall. But this usually isn't the case. SMS runs on cellular networks like those operated by AT&T and Verizon.