Medical laboratories have filled their test menus, whether paper or electronic, with bewildering nomenclature and abbreviations and have failed to appreciate the dangers of assigning perilously similar names to different tests. The efficient and efficacious patient care demanded by the quality care initiative requires progress beyond traditional solutions, such as convening naming conventions, to the development of innovative software with intelligent, real-time, clinically driven search functions that will allow these programs to help rather than hinder physicians.