The online review website Yelp is adding healthcare data to its pages for certain businesses that offer medical services, states an August 5, 2015, Washington Post article. Compiled by nonprofit news organization ProPublica as part of a partnership with the website, the data is for 4,600 hospitals, 15,000 nursing homes, and 6,300 dialysis clinics and will be updated quarterly. The hospital data shows average emergency department wait times, the quality of doctor communications with patients, and the level of noise in patient rooms; the nursing-home information includes fines paid for serious deficiencies and payment suspensions related to poor performance; and the data for dialysis clinics reveals information about how often kidney patients were readmitted to the hospital and mortality rates. Although much of the data is already available on government websites, such as Hospital Compare, Yelp and ProPublica believe that the information is difficult for people to find and sift through. "Many people think of the Yelp platform for finding great restaurants and hotels, and it certainly is," states Luther Lowe, Yelp's vice president for policy, in the article. "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."

HRC Recommends: The factors being published on Yelp are factors that signal quality of care to patients, residents, and caregivers. Regardless of their being publicly available or not, hospitals, nursing homes, and dialysis clinics should be tracking and analyzing this data in order to ensure that care delivered in these settings is of a high quality, is delivered as efficiently and effectively as possible, and respects patients' and residents' autonomy.