In this short position paper, we highlight the importance of numbers in clinical text. We first present a taxonomy of number variants. We then perform corpus analysis to analyze characteristics of number use in several clinical corpora. Based on our findings of extensive use of numbers, and limited understanding of the impact of numbers on clinical NLP tasks, we identify the need for a public benchmark that will support investigation of numerical processing tasks for the clinical domain.. ©2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.