Yelp, ProPublica Team Up To Provide Data On Health Care Facilities Via Smartphones
Yelp has gone through many changes since it was founded in 2004. What initially started off as a way to find your favorite restaurants near you has blossomed into the go-to app for reading restaurant reviews, finding hidden dive bars, locating the nearest Verizon wireless store, and much more. Now, the next step in the evolution of Yelp is allowing users to rate their experience at a hospital.
Yelp has teamed with non-profit newsroom ProPublica — which centers on investigative journalism for the common public — to provide not only consumer reviews based on patient surveys, but also with statistics-based objective data from nearly 250,000 hospitals and care centers across the U.S.
If you’re unfamiliar, Yelp is a website and an app on your smartphone that allows you to search for a vast amount of stores located near you or the address of your choice. What separates it from, say, the Yellow Pages, is that real-life (most of the time) people submit reviews about whatever shop, restaurant, bar, or store they entered, and give it a ranking out of five stars. That way, you can find the best shop, restaurant, bar, or store to fit your needs.
"Many people think of the Yelp platform for finding great restaurants and hotels, and it certainly is," Luther Lowe, Yelp's vice president for policy, told The Washington Post. "We're taking data that otherwise might live in some government PDF that's hard to find and we're putting it in a context where it makes sense for people who may be in the middle of making critical decisions."
ProPublica is supplying the information regarding the hospitals and care facilities based on its own research into the subject, as well as information that’s readily available at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This info will allow consumers to see the fines accumulated in a nursing home, the deficiencies of clinics, and a patient’s overall experience at a hospital. Basically, you’ll be using Yelp the same way you’ve used it to search for your favorite froyo joint, but this time you’ll be looking at a hospital.
It will be interesting to see how successful adding hospital ratings to Yelp will be. Would you really go to Yelp during a life-or-death situation to find the hospital with the lowest ER wait time? Say you do find one, but it is 45 minutes away? While the idea of picking a hospital based on what real people are saying about it is appealing, only time will tell if this really changes where people go when they need care.