Last week, a fellow editor couldn't take it any more. She had to get something off her chest.
"You know what system I hate writing about?" She paused her typing, turned to me and named a newly formed health system in the Midwest, which shall remain unspecified. "It has at least four different names. I never know what to call it. And its website is a mess!"
I sympathized with her. So many systems have legacy names, operating names, colloquial hyphenated names — maybe more. How strange it feels to call a health system's public affairs department and say, "Hi, can you tell me the name of the organization I just called?" And yet, desperately seeking accuracy, that's just what we do.
Even stranger is how long this confusion persists. We're only healthcare journalists who write about hundreds of hospitals and health systems every week. I can't imagine being an employee of that system, hearing people refer to my organization four different ways day after day. Or, worse, a patient — one who doesn't know the strategic reasons why the name and familiar face of her hospital changed overnight.
Ambiguity is a bad look in healthcare.
Speaking of bad: Health systems adopt some pretty strange names. I once left an article I was writing open on my computer, halfway done, when my friend borrowed it to check movie times. Before she closed out of the story, the health system's name caught her eye. "Nice name," she said. "It sounds like a piece of Ikea furniture. What does that even mean?"
It was a mumbo-jumbo moniker, the smashing of words that mean nothing together. I wonder why there aren't more hospitals named after historical figures, medical pioneers, influential nurses, hometown points of pride. You know, names that mean something. Names we have a shot at understanding without reading the health system's annual report.
Healthcare system names can be highly disjointed, confusing and downright bad. There's much room for improvement, but there's another strange dynamic at play. Every now and then, a health system fixes a name that is hardly broken compared to the others out there.
St. Louis-based SSM Health Care recently removed the last word off its name, a formal change intended to "demonstrate [its] commitment to general health and wellness, rather than treating illness."
The removal of words that conjure visions of old-school healthcare isn't a new trend. It happened a few years ago with "system." Consumer research suggested system wasn't a positive word, according to Kim Fox, vice president at healthcare strategic communications firm Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock in Nashville, Tenn. "It made healthcare sound so business-oriented," she says. Armed with this research, many systems decided to present themselves as something else.
But when did "care" become a dirty word? What do health systems want us to think they are providing these days — services and procedures? And why are health systems entertaining this either/or game of demonstrating a commitment to wellness or treating illness? What happened to both?
Thinking about these questions is part of my job. Patients have other things on their mind, like their test results, the hospital bill they must negotiate or how they will get off work early to make their cardiologist appointment next Tuesday.
So much of healthcare is inherently tough. Patients deserve some ease and certainty, at least about the name of the place where they must go.
"We've done a pretty good job of confusing our consumers," says Ms. Fox. And this confusion comes at an awful time. "There is more buying power, if that's the right phrase, with the exchanges and increasing out-of-pocket expenses. I am not sure consumers have really bought healthcare before. The last thing you want to do is confuse your consumers about who you are. If you have a disjointed brand out there, you want to fix it now. It's important for consumers to know who you are, what you stand for, all the things under your umbrella. Once consumers decide on a brand, they want to stick with it."