Healthcare Abbreviations
Do You Speak "Acronym," the Language of Healthcare?
Unless you have medical training or are unfortunate enough to have family members with chronic health conditions, you may not be familiar with medical terminology. That being the case, you may feel that you are in a foreign country when you walk through the doors of a healthcare organization. Medical personnel tend to forget that not everyone speaks “medical-ese.” Therefore, you may find someone trying to be helpful, who says, “Go past MRI, turn right at CT, and keep going until you reach the PET scanner. But if you reach the PF labs, you’ve gone too far; come back to the door just past the hazmat sign.”
Healthcare personnel do not speak English. They speak acronym, a language known to all healthcare workers but few others. They can complete an entire conversation without uttering a single complete sentence or using a whole word. Furthermore, both parties in the conversation understand exactly what was said. They write that way as well.
While it’s great that they know what they are saying, patients get lost in the alphabet soup flying over their heads or written in the discharge orders or lab reports. Though regulatory agencies are diligently trying to reduce the use of acronyms due to mistakes made while using them, they remain prevalent. Therefore, I thought you might like a place where you could look up a few of the most commonly used abbreviated terms.
Below is the alphabet spread across the page. Click on the letter that corresponds to the first letter of the acronym/abbreviation you are trying to decipher.
