This study aimed to analyze trend of names of clinic-level medical institutions and pharmacy in Korea to understand interaction between health care provider and consumer.

This study analyzes 60,101 medical clinic names, 27,609 dental clinic names, 25,506 Korean medicine clinic names, and 68,032 pharmacy names. Official records from Korea Local Information Research & Development Institute, data from 1946 to June 2024. Researcher uses text-mining technique including tokenizer of Soynlp and wordcloud to visualize trends.

In pharmacy business names, franchise name ‘Onnuri’ is dominant. In case of dental clinic and Korean medicine clinic, university names like ‘Seoul’, ‘Yeonsei’, ‘Kyunghee’ are dominant. Similarly, medical clinic names include university names but also teaching hospital names like ‘Samsung’ or ‘Seongmo(St. Mary)’. Commonly used word in clinic-level medical institution and pharmacy is ‘Uri’ and latest trend words are ‘Bareun’ and ‘365’.

Methods presented in this study for analyzing business names can directly applied to the study of business names in other industries. The results of this study would develop marketing strategies of medical industry. Furthermore, since business name provide concentrated data on market perception and the interaction between consumers and providers, they can be useful for sociology and medical humanities researchers.