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Comment by BoxOfRain | Hacker News Reader

>My local hospital telephones with private numbers, which is the only reason I cannot completely block them and thus cannot use a whitelist.

Can anyone with more context explain to me why a rational person decided on this? It's Biblically frustrating for me because 9/10 withheld numbers are spammers or scammers and I don't want to pick up the phone to them but 1/10 it's my local doctor's surgery who I can't ignore. It's such an antisocial thing for doctors of all people to do, but it seems to be common enough people across the world have to deal with it.

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Mostly because there is usually a bunch of phones in a practice (and a shitload in hospitals), and you don't want patients to call back to for example the MRT/CT lab.

The other problem is privacy... imagine a woman consulting her ob/gyn about an abortion. The ob/gyn calls the woman back, and suddenly the abusive husband sees the phone number of the ob/gyn practice on the incoming call log.

While I do understand this reasoning somewhat I don't know why its only limited to hospitals and doctors. I can imagine thousands of situations where this abusive partner would have a problem with an incoming number hospital or not. I'm not sure its a great idea to structure our communications around hypothetical abusive people, a call directly to the number that is provided from the organization you provided it to is private enough.

> I'm not sure its a great idea to structure our communications around hypothetical abusive people

Domestic violence is far from hypothetical [1], it is the sad reality we live in. Medicine in particular has a responsibility by the Hippocratic Oath to avoid causing harm, and the laws (e.g. HIPAA) reflect that responsibility.

[1] https://www.socialsolutions.com/blog/domestic-violence-stati...

So, women are abused sometimes therefore doctor's must mask their numbers due to the Hippocratic Oath and HIPAA? Do the doctor's have to disguise their voices as well? Maybe they should talk in code. I won't pretend to be an expert on HIPAA but I very strongly doubt that calling from random numbers is part of it. Wouldn't the random calls look suspicious to the abuser in this circumstance? IMHO something like this would cause more abuse than just I dunno.. lying about why the doctor's office called.

> Wouldn't the random calls look suspicious to the abuser in this circumstance?

No, precisely because random calls from suppressed numbers are so common for spam.

Probably patient privacy and the intersection with domestic abuse.

Physicians want to be accessible only via specific channels, to protect their time and to ensure there is consistent process across patients. Most of the time as a patient you can’t call them directly, unless you work through the page operator or you plan ahead with them on predefined phone number and time.

> to protect their time

Then they should understand why people ignore calls coming from unverified numbers.

Unless they're using their personal cell phone, this should be a basic feature of the hospitals phone system, it is a feature decades old. No reason the caller ID should be set to the DID of the doctor.

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