The Naming Maze
- carbesman
- Dec 17, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 5
How Getting Lost in Healthcare Taxonomy and Wayfinding Costs Millions
Jon Levy, Paul Schrimpf
"I'm sorry, we don't take your insurance."
This phrase, common in patient stories across the U.S., reflects more than coverage gaps. It exposes deep failures in healthcare taxonomy and wayfinding. When insurer directories, billing systems, and health system names don’t align, patients face denied coverage, weeks of confusion, and sometimes thousands of dollars in unexpected bills.
Analyses of commercial insurance claims indicate that roughly one in five emergency or inpatient admissions originating in the emergency department at in-network hospitals involve at least one out-of-network bill. When provider networks and billing practices are opaque, patients can incur large out-of-network charges at facilities they reasonably believed were in network. The result is eroded trust, financial distress, and growing skepticism of the system itself.
When Names Don’t Match, Systems Break
The complexity of the U.S. healthcare system is magnified by inconsistent, fragmented naming of care locations. Terms such as hospital, medical center, and institute may appear interchangeable, but in practice they introduce confusion, increase the risk of surprise billing, and fuel costly administrative errors.
These inconsistencies undermine patient experience, data reliability, and operational performance. Even digitally savvy consumers get tripped up by mismatched naming; patients with limited digital literacy face even steeper barriers.
A unified naming convention is foundational. Patients should never struggle to reconcile what’s on their insurance card with what’s on the building or appointment confirmation. This isn’t a marketing concern. It’s an operational and patient-safety imperative.
What Patient Confusion Means for Outcomes and Preference
Patient confusion isn’t merely inconvenient; it worsens outcomes and erodes revenue. Industry analyses estimate that missed medical appointments cost U.S. providers roughly $150 billion annually, reflecting both lost revenue and downstream clinical risk from delayed care. While no-shows stem from a mix of access, socioeconomic, and communication barriers, wayfinding and navigation challenges are a contributing factor in many systems.
Press Ganey’s 2025 consumer research reinforces this connection. Nearly half (48.4%) of healthcare consumers report appointment barriers, and these friction points are associated with an average 13.1-point drop in “likelihood to recommend” scores. As the report notes, patients choose organizations that are easy to find and easy to navigate. If they get lost, or billed unexpectedly, they go elsewhere.
Staff feel the strain as well. Time spent redirecting patients or resolving discrepancies diverts attention from care delivery. Wayfinding and signage specialists consistently note that fragmented naming and signage amplify patient stress, contribute to late or missed arrivals, and create avoidable operational friction for frontline teams.
At Croydon Health Services in the UK, for example, a digital wayfinding and Wi-Fi solution helped reduce missed appointments and freed staff time previously spent guiding patients around the campus. Internal modeling suggests that even 10 minutes per staff member per day devoted to wayfinding support can consume roughly 2% of total staff time, easily exceeding $1 million annually in labor value at a 500-bed hospital. These figures are illustrative, but they convey the scale of the problem.
The Financial Ripple Effect
Naming inconsistencies carry serious financial consequences. Industry surveys and HFMA reports consistently identify administrative errors in registration, eligibility, and coding as leading causes of claim denials and delayed reimbursement in multi-site health systems.
Internal reviews at some organizations show that mismatched site names and identifiers between EMRs and payer files account for a meaningful share of avoidable delays, sometimes adding weeks to payment timelines.
For patients, misaligned naming often results in surprise bills or out-of-network charges. Research has long shown that medical issues, including billing disputes, contribute to a significant share of U.S. personal bankruptcies, as documented by Health Affairs, KFF, and related analyses. If patients can’t tell where they’re going, or even where they are, how can they know whether care is covered? Too often, the answer surfaces only after a procedure.
These effects form a destructive loop: trust erodes, care is deferred, and operational efficiency declines. Standardized naming protects both providers and consumers, serving as a stabilizing safeguard within the financial ecosystem.
When Brand Architecture Becomes Infrastructure
In healthcare, name standardization is infrastructure, not branding. Variations in descriptors, Medical Center, Hospital, Institute, sometimes applied to the same location disrupt data flows across EMRs, payer systems, search engines, and mapping tools.
Data-management providers such as Dun & Bradstreet demonstrate that standardized organization and location names materially improve data quality and entity matching, which are essential for accurate billing, reporting, and analytics. Brand and implementation consultancies similarly report that harmonized naming reduces confusion across websites, signage, and billing statements.
Healthcare operations experts often compare care-site naming to airport codes: names must be precise, universally recognized, and operationally actionable. When the map no longer matches the territory, both patients and providers pay the price.
The Digital Map Doesn't Match the Physical One
For most patients, the care journey begins online yet directory listings, signage, and insurance records rarely align. A single facility may appear as:
· Mercy Hospital South Pavilion
· Mercy Medical Center – South Campus
· Mercy Infirmary
· Mercy Heart and Vascular Institute
Algorithms struggle to reconcile these differences; patients struggle even more.
Fragmented digital footprints create ambiguity that hurts visibility and access. Research on healthcare consumer confusion shows that complex, fragmented information structures impair decision quality. When naming complexity is layered onto emotional stress and time pressure, anxiety and operational errors increase. Treating wayfinding and naming as an afterthought introduces real risk with real stakes.
Descriptors Aren't Branding
Terms like Institute or Wellness Complex may sound aspirational, but they don’t help patients navigate, and often hinder them. There are many ways to communicate value through brand and experience. Location descriptors shouldn’t carry that burden.
Patients need clarity, not inspiration. Standardized descriptors improve wayfinding and system reliability. Healthcare should treat naming the way aviation or banking does: hospitals are hospitals; airports are airports; banks are banks. Wells Fargo would never call one of its branches a “Financial Wellness Hub.”
A single master brand, sometimes two during acquisition transitions, is sufficient. Creative naming elsewhere injects confusion and weakens the very brand it aims to elevate. It’s a lose-lose.
BrandActive and peer consultancies often warn that poorly coordinated naming and wayfinding can even create regulatory exposure. During rebrands, inconsistent facility names across digital and physical touchpoints can trigger CMS scrutiny for provider-based departments, leading to audits, delayed reimbursement, or legal risk.
From Words to Systems
Achieving naming clarity requires coordinated governance across digital, marketing, facilities, IT, and patient-experience teams. Standardization isn’t a one-time cleanup; it’s an ongoing discipline.
Effective programs typically:
Clean and normalize records: Remove duplicates and standardize naming across systems
Audit site-label patterns: Identify inconsistencies and conflicting descriptors
Define a clear framework: Establish patient-friendly naming categories for hospitals, clinics, outpatient centers, and specialty sites
Synchronize systems: Align identifiers across EMRs, scheduling tools, payer directories, and public listings
Monitor and maintain: Create governance and review processes for new sites and acquisitions
Execute physically: Update signage, road signs, and third-party mapping sources
Reconcile external databases: Keep insurer and marketplace listings accurate and prevent “wayfinding creep”
When done well, this work produces more than operational order; it builds trust. Treating naming consistency as a quality standard, akin to safety or infection control, embeds clarity into daily operations.
A Map for the Future
As healthcare decentralizes into ambulatory, home-based, and retail settings, naming discipline becomes even more critical. Leading systems now treat naming as a core operational standard, building unified taxonomies across EMRs, payer files, and digital directories.
When patients can find you, they can trust you. When systems name consistently, data clarity and operational synergy follow. Until healthcare treats naming as infrastructure rather than decoration, it will continue to lose patients, and financial stability, inside its own maze.
Acknowledgements & Citations
This report draws insights and direct quotes from:
Garmon, C., & Gates, S. M. (2016). Surprise! Out-of-network bills are common in cases of unexpected hospital admissions. Health Affairs, 35(8), 1486–1492.
Healthcare IT News / HC Innovation Group (2017). Missed appointments cost the U.S. healthcare system $150B each year. Based on industry analysis of no-show rates and appointment cancellations.
Press Ganey. (2025). Patients as Consumers: New Research Report Shows a New Era of Expectations in Healthcare. Press Ganey Institute.
ID Signsystems. (2023). Navigating the Art and Science of Healthcare Wayfinding. Experiential design and healthcare wayfinding guidance.
Purple AI. (2025). Croydon Health Services: Reducing Missed Appointments. Case study on digital wayfinding and staff time savings.
Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). (2024). Administrative Claim Denials and Reimbursement Delays. HFMA survey and analysis of revenue-cycle challenges in multi-site health systems.
Himmelstein, D. U., Warren, E., Thorne, D., & Woolhandler, S. (2005). MarketWatch: Illness and injury as contributors to bankruptcy. Health Affairs, W5-63–W5-73.
Retireguide.com. (2025). 49+ U.S. Medical Bankruptcy Statistics for 2023. Compilation of medical debt and bankruptcy research.
Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). (2025). Health Care Debt In The U.S.: The Broad Consequences Of Medical Debt and Debt Collection Practices. KFF Health Care Debt Survey.
Dun & Bradstreet. (2024). Name and Address Standardization API Guide. Data quality and entity resolution documentation.
Dun & Bradstreet. (2024). Direct 2.0 Reference Materials: Corporate Identity and Match APIs. Documentation on data standardization and matching for business entities.
Data Integration Toolkit. What is Name and Address Standardization? Dun & Bradstreet support documentation.
ID Signsystems. (2023). Healthcare Wayfinding Pitfalls to Avoid. Guidance on design, naming, and operational consistency in healthcare environments.
BrandActive and peer consultancies. Healthcare naming and brand architecture guidance based on case studies and implementation experience.
Chauhan, A., & Sagar, M. (2020). Consumer confusion in healthcare decision-making and choice: A systematic review. Emerald Insight / Journal of Consumer Marketing. Research on how information complexity and fragmentation affect patient choice.