HIPAA foolishness

One of the more comical yet frustrating aspects of visiting the ICN has been this. Each room at the ICN holds up to 4 babies, so at any given time Eliza is sharing a room with two or three other babies, ranging from tiny micro-preemies like her, to near-full-term newborns who only stay for a few days, to older and bigger babies who are in for the long term due to severe health issues. Although there's a fair amount of turnover and occasional relocations from room to room, we more often than not have had a particular roommate for days to weeks at a time.

However! Despite spending hours a day in the same room with these babies for days, without even a partition or curtain between Eliza's incubator and theirs, the nurses cannot tell us anything about the other babies' health issues, current status, or recent milestones, due (I can only assume) to HIPAA privacy regulations. We can see at a glance the little info card on each bed (which shows their name, birth date, birth weight, and parents' contact information), and we can look at them and see that they're on bili lights at the moment, or connected to a ventilator today when they were on the CPAP yesterday, or see that the nurses have to put on disposable gowns when handling this baby (meaning this one has something contagious) - but we can't ask even the simplest questions like "How's that baby doing today" and expect an answer from the nurse.

I know I tend to be a curious (nosy?) person by nature, so perhaps my viewpoint is not typical, but I think it would often be comforting, or at least informative, to know what's happening with the other babies that we see every day. Are they having similar issues to what we've been through? Are the different issues that they're facing ones that Eliza will have to deal with in her future? Are they improving day to day, staying stable, or declining?

It's especially strange and disconcerting whenever we walk in to Eliza's room and find that where one of her roommates was yesterday, there's now only an empty berth or even a completely different baby. Did the other baby get to go home? Did they transfer it to a different room (for whatever obscure reasons they have for rearranging the babies - better feng shui?)? Or did something terrible happen? The nurses never say.

At least some of the babies have actively involved parents whose visiting schedules match ours, so we can talk with their parents, swap stories and medical updates, and learn about them that way. Some of Eliza's current roommates are lucky this way, and it's been very helpful to be able to have someone to talk to who's dealing with similar stuff as a parent. But it makes me wonder that much more about the babies whose parents we don't see or get a chance to talk to. What's their story?