The Good and Bad of a New Hospital Building

The hospital addition that I blogged about last year because of its topping tree is completed and almost ready to open to patients.

Today, the public was invited to tour it.  I have no pictures of the outside because it was drizzling.

(Caution, if you proceed, there are pictures of hospital rooms and related views).

Inside, it was state of the art, which, nowadays, is both good and bad.

The good part:  the emergency department.  This hospital badly needed a good one and the new state of the art ED has negative pressure rooms and intentionally built in privacy.  Also, brand new state of the art patient rooms with lots and lots of windows and natural light.  More on that later.

How about a short tour of the non-emergency area, which is exciting to see when you don't have yourself or a family member inside.

Artwork everywhere (created by local artists). All are designed to be calming and to help promote healing.

An example of a patient room and the large window.

Part of the wall of the meditation room - an electronic wall with soothing (one hopes), changing art.

The bad part:   I'll get to it shortly. 

In this patient room, the old fashioned low-tech whiteboard has been replaced with a screen on which you can watch television (if you have a Netflix account you can even sign into it). You can view videos that will educate you if you have a newly diagnosed condition (and they will know if you've played it), and you can bring up info about your care team and your outcome goals.

Outside your room, this tells the professional about to enter more about you.  What's your preferred language?  Are you a falls risk?  

One of many nurses' stations.  This is  small one.

So, what is there not to like?

Wellllllllll....there are two hospital systems in my immediate home area.  The hospital above is part of one of them.  The other was sold to a new owner in February.  The old owner was hit by a ransomware attack on May 8, before the new owner could totally switch their IT infrastructure and related systems over to their own.

Ooops.  

We who are patients of doctors in that other system are still feeling the aftereffects of the attack, including their continued inability to access electronic records and make new appointments.

So, about all those electronic gadgets I showed you in those photos - we are assured the owners of this hospital system have strong measures in place to keep them up and running.  But, I also know that the weakest part of a security system is its human users, and the attackers get more sophisticated each day.

I was assured that there are backup systems "just in case".  Let's hope.

It was a beautiful building.

I just hope those whiteboards don't have to be pulled out of storage one day.

Don't Expect Privacy

Sometimes, the mail brings a big surprise.

Yesterday, there was a letter in our mailbox.  Yes, a real live, actual, letter.  The return name and address were that of someone we haven't seen in many years - a man that my spouse served in the military with and had become friends with. (Let's call him OMF or Old Military Friend).  

After spouse got out of the military, we visited OMF and his family in the late 1970's when we were in his home area.  I think we exchanged a handful of letters (this was before email) and then lost touch.

Back around 2009-2010, I found a blog.  The blog author was a high school teacher in that same state with the same name as OMF.  I took a chance and contacted him asking if he was the same man my spouse had served with.  He was.  

But after one exchange of letters we lost touch with each other.  Again.

Until yesterday.

The letter began:  "Hello (my spouse's nickname in the military) (at least I hope so)" and went on to say that he found my spouse's address through a 2010 document that discussed a manufacturing building (now demolished) in our neighborhood.  It was owned by the military and rented out to a major defense contractor.

It was ruined in a flood the year after the document was published.

It's a wonderful thing when something online helps old friends reconnect. 

But that document....

I found it online in less than a minute.  I won't get into the document except it had to do with pollution found at the site (not unknown to me).  There was a plan to clean up the site.

And, in an appendix, I found this: (bolding is mine)

Residents Living Nearby [name of building]

Residential Contacts – Pursuant to Exemption 6 of the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA), 5 USC 552(b)(6), this list should not be released to the public to protect the personal privacy of the residents living nearby [name of building].

Below that heading was a list of the name and address of  people living in my neighborhood and a couple of other neighborhoods as of 2010.

Online,where anyone can find it.

And no, I'm not linking to it.

I believe all the information in this appendix is public information and, I know several named people are either deceased or have moved away.

But some of us are still living there.

True, the document had a good use - it helped OMF find us (yet again).  But what ever happened to the disclosure that a list of names and addresses should not be released?  Because it certainly was released.  I'm not a lawyer, and maybe there is a time limit to this exemption to the Freedom of Information Act.  After all, the document is from 2010.

We all know we have no expectation of privacy nowadays. I already have a footprint on search engines due to blogging and use of social media.  So do many of my readers.  And there are all the databases that contain information on us.

But it still feels weird to see what I saw online yesterday.  Maybe "weird" isn't the right word, but I can't find the right word to describe it.

P.S.  yes, my spouse is going to answer that letter.

Doubleplusungood

In July of 2009 (the first year of my blog) I blogged about an incident where Amazon.com "disappeared" Kindle copies of the book 1984 by George Orwell.  This book, written in 1949 by the late George Orwell, was a warning against totalitarianism and the ability of governments to manipulate information.

In the world of 1984, there was no Internet.  But there were telescreens in each home that had to stay on constantly and they were two way - you watched them but Big Brother (yes, that was where that name came from) watched you, in turn.  There was constant emotional manipulation in a daily ceremony called the Two Minute Hate, where Party members had to watch a film about the Party's enemies and scream out their hate in a period of two minutes.

Constant surveillance.  Information manipulation.  Sound familiar?

Now, 1984 has climbed to the top of the best seller charts once again.  Yes, this has happened before, notably in the early 1980's, and again in 2013.  This isn't a brand new phenomenon.

Think about our modern world for a minute.  Websites and their contents can disappear or change in a minute.   We ponder these questions:  Are our virtual assistants, Siri and Alexa (among others) secretly listening to our conversations?  Recording our questions? (The answer to this last one, incidentally, is "yes" for both Siri and Alexa.)  Is there tracking software that can follow what we say on Facebook or Twitter, ready for the future use of a totalitarian leader?

There was the incident late last year where an Amazon Echo in the state of Arkansas may have been a digital witness to a murder.

What does privacy mean anymore?


Here's my post from 2009:

Doubleplusungood, dudes

This is not new news. For all that I love buying from amazon.com, this gives me a bit of that Big Brother feeling.

For all of you lucky enough to study the book "1984" in high school back in the 1960's, there are certain things in this book that stuck with you forever. The present generation would not be impressed but this book was absolutely chilling in its depiction of a world where a dictatorship totally controlled all sources of information, complete with a Ministry of Truth whose bureaucrats labored to continuously revise all written records to reflect the current Party line. To control thought, a new language called Newspeak was introduced. Words and thought were so short in Newspeak that one could spit sentences out without giving a thought to what one was actually saying.

Of course, nowadays we manipulate photos with ease via programs such as Photoshop and can manipulate electronic records with just as much ease.

And, apparently, we can buy an electronic book and download into our Kindle, and Bi...I mean, Amazon.com, can take it back for whatever reason.

When's the last time your local bookstore knocked down your door to grab back a book you legally paid for?

How ironic (not that this is exactly not my original thought) that the book they "vanished" was....1984. (Along with another Orwell classic, "Animal Farm".)

For the record:
1. This was due to a copyright infringement issue, not censorship and
2. Amazon.com duly refunded monies paid to the customers affected.

However, when they sent emails with the refund notices, some customers claimed Amazon never bothered to explain what was going on. (Disclosure: I do not own a Kindle and was not affected by this.).

But still. This gives me a very big sense of unease especially as I've been thinking about getting a Kindle. Not any more. Who would have thought of a Kindle as a two-way device quite like this? If you buy anything via Kindle, is it really yours? Can amazon.com take stuff back whenever they want? Maybe we should just stick to the old fashioned books that clutter up the house?

If not Big-Brotherish, it is certainly creepy.

Day 29 of the Ultimate Blog Challenge.