I suspect that it isn’t the biggest risk from a compromise standpoint(at least for people boring enough not to send paparazzi after, this isn’t an expensive or difficult attack by those standards); but I imagine that from a compliance standpoint it looks bad.
EMRs are notorious for failing at actually being secure; but their operators can incur legal exposure if they don’t follow a suitably cumbersome set of best practices for being insecure. It is hard to imagine that broadcasting a steady drip of plaintext meets even the most minimal standards of diligent incompetence.
(One also wonders, given the large number of structures conveniently built for good RF coverage, steady power, and decent backhaul; among other mounting sites, if the fact that eavesdropping on cleartext pager traffic is probably legal; unlike breaking into even pitifully defended but CFAA-covered computer systems, has made doing it in bulk worth the while of some creepy data broker types. The protocols were designed with fairly minimal bandwidth in mind; so dumping all the chatter to disk just in case someone can think of something profitably unethical to do with it would be comparatively inexpensive.)
