The next time you visit a friend or loved one in the hospital, you may overhear the nurses, doctors, and other medical staff run off an entire alphabet soup of conditions, qualifiers, and medications. While it may seem like gibberish to the average person, those mash-ups of letters and numbers are necessary to expedite communication, ensuring that the patient currently being seen is administered the proper treatments in a manner swift enough for the doctor or technician to see the next patient. It is for this expediency that several former acronyms are no longer used, in order to avoid confusion.