Data on emergency room wait times, quality of physician communication and fines paid by nursing homes may soon be as accessible as reviews of your local taco stop or burger joint.
Customer-review site Yelp and ProPublica are teaming up to bring research and CMS data from 4,600 hospitals, 15,000 nursing homes and 6,300 dialysis centers to Yelp's review pages, according to The Washington Post.
While patients have always been able to write reviews on medical practices on Yelp, the partnership with ProPublica will add supplemental information. According to the report, the information will be similar to that provided on Medicare's Hospital Compare site, but Yelp executives believe their familiar platform and presentation will make the information more palatable for consumers.
"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," Luther Lowe, Yelp vice president of policy, said in the report.
In exchange for providing information to Yelp and its users, ProPublica will have access to Yelp's healthcare reviews to use for news research, according to the report.
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