Yelp is Offering More Detailed Reviews on ER Rooms, Hospitals, Clinics, Nursing Homes

By Cheri Cheng - 06 Aug '15 17:05PM

Yelp will be adding a lot more features on its pages for medical businesses.

Yelp, the popular website that allows users to review several different businesses, ranging from restaurants to hair salons, has partnered up with ProPublica in order to give users access to government information on emergency rooms, hospitals, dialysis clinics and nursing homes. ProPublica is a nonprofit news organization.

"Many people think of the Yelp platform for finding great restaurants and hotels, and it certainly is," said Luther Lowe, Yelp's vice president for policy. "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."

Lowe added that they got the idea to increase information on medical businesses because of what the consumers were typing in everyday.

"People aren't typing 'emergency room Santa Monica' into Yelp for fun," Lowe said. "They're on their way to the hospital and trying to figure out which one has the shortest wait time. People are coming to Yelp to make these decisions, and it makes so much sense to put this government data in the context where people are actually going to rely on it."

The new information, which ProPublica compiled on its own and from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, includes ER room's average wait times, number of hospital beds, hospitals' re-admittance rates for dialysis patients due to treatment-related infections and fines that nursing homes paid.

The data involves 4,600 hospitals, 15,000 nursing homes and 6,300 dialysis clinics across the United States.

Most of the information that Yelp is now providing for these specific businesses was already accessible by the pubic via Medicare's Hospital Compare Web page. However, since the Yelp executives felt like the data could be hard to sift through, they decided to make it easier by including them on Yelp.