Once in a while, someone suggests there should be a Yelp-like tool for evaluating healthcare providers. Now, there is one: Yelp.
Yelp has had listings for hospitals and other healthcare facilities for a while. On Wednesday, though, the pages for more than 25,000 hospitals, nursing homes and dialysis clinics got a whole lot more useful, as the ratings site added data on such things as emergency room waiting times, readmission rates, fines paid for safety violations and even how well physicians communicate with patients.
The information comes from research by journalism nonprofit ProPublica, as well as from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services databases. (ProPublica caused a stir in healthcare last month with the introduction of the groundbreaking Surgical Scorecard.)
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“Now the millions of consumers who use Yelp to find and evaluate everything from restaurants to retail will 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,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote on the company’s blog.
Stoppelman also referred readers to a Washington Post story. The Post quoted Yelp’s Luther Lowe as saying: “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.”
This improvement apparently has been in the works for a long time. Wired reported that Yelp co-founders Stoppelman and Russel Simmons “were more concerned with how to find a good doctor online than where to grab a decent meal when they started the company in 2004.”
