Rating restaurants is not “good enough” for Yelp. With massive and active community, they want to help consumers get relevant information for other services, beyond dining.
So they’re teaming up with ProPublica to incorporate health care statistics and consumer opinion survey data onto the Yelp business pages of more than 25,000 medical treatment facilities.
Now, Yelp users can have even more information at their fingertips when they are in the midst of the most critical life decisions.The information is compiled from ProPublica’s own research and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for 4,600 hospitals, 15,000 nursing homes, and 6,300 dialysis clinics in the US, and will be updated quarterly. By hover text on the business page, users will get useful statistics, including the number of serious deficiencies and fines per nursing home and emergency room wait times for hospitals. For example, West Kendall Baptist Hospital has better than average doctor communication and an average 33 minute ER wait time, Beachside Nursing Center currently has no deficiencies, and San Mateo Dialysis Center has a better than average patient survival rate.
Now, Yelp users can have even more information at their fingertips when they are in the midst of the most critical life decisions, like which hospital to choose for a sick child or which nursing home will provide the best care for aging parents.
And that’s just a start; Yelp hopes to further expand its partnership with ProPublica in the future to include additional categories of information, and has already shared a data set from its vast collection of user generated content to inform ProPublica’s research and reporting.
ProPublica, for those living under a rock is the Pulitzer Prize winning non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.