Yelp, ProPublica pair to give consumers more data on health care facilities

Just as Yelp can give you advice on which restaurant to go to for the best burgers, now it can give you advice on which hospital to go to for the shortest emergency room waiting time.

Yelp announced Wednesday that it has joined forces with ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news organization, to incorporate additional statistics onto the Yelp pages of more than 25,000 medical treatment facilities pages.

This new feature comes as part of Yelp's Consumer Protection Initiative, which is a series of steps the company is taking to clean the site from misleading, false, or biased reviews.

Although consumers have always been able to review hospitals and clinics on Yelp, the process for this new feature, which will appear under a box called "About this Provider," will be different.

Consumers will not be able to contribute to information in this box. Rather, Yelp uses information that ProPublica compiled from its own research, as well as information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This information will be updated quarterly.

Yelp spokeswoman Rachel Walker said ProPublica advised Yelp on which data points would be the most effective for display — such as health care facilities' average ER wait time, patient-reported information on physician communication, and the noise level in patient rooms.

"This is all about doing everything we can to protect and empower consumers and give them as much information as possible about a local business when they're making a spending decision," Walker said.

Yelp is a crowd-sourced reviews site that changed the game of word-of-mouth recommendations. It publishes reviews of local businesses, written by people who have had first hand experiences with the business. The company was founded in 2004, and has taken hold in major metro areas across 31 countries.

According to Yelp statistics, business in the health category make up 6% of reviewed business, while shopping (23%) and restaurants (16%) take up a larger portion. However, the company says that it hopes the new feature will help the amount of healthcare reviews grow.

As the healthcare industry experiences a digital boom, 77% of consumers begin their healthcare search online, and 45% read online reviews before booking an appointment, according 2015 Healthcare Consumer Trends survey.

Andrew Ibbotson, vice president of the National Research Corporation, which converts thousands of patient satisfaction surveys into online ratings for hospitals personal websites, said Yelp is taking a great step in providing consumers with more information on healthcare providers.

However, he said, even with the "About this Provider" box, Yelp reviews do not always provide the whole scope of the general consumer opinion.

"While it is helpful, having general information doesn't really add as much value as doctor-specific feedback that pretty much every hospital in the country is capturing," he said. "Healthcare is very personal — often it is about a one-on-one relationship, so the information that consumers crave the most is information about a particular doctor."

Much of the information about the hospitals that will now be compiled on Yelp is already available on government websites, such as Medicare's Hospital Compare web page.

With the addition of this new feature, Yelp said, it is simply making the information more accessible.

"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," the company said in a blog post.

This parnership with ProPublica comes after Yelp hit some turmoil on Wall Street last week, and faces growing competition from Google and Facebook.

Shares of the San Francisco-based company plunged after it reported grim second-quarter earnings, which included revenue loss of $1.3 million (two cents a share) compared to the $2.7 million (four cents a share) profit it registered for the same quarter a year ago.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Trisha Thadani on Twitter: @TrishaThadani