Patients today often use third-party review sites to review hospitals and share their experiences as well as find out what others have to say about healthcare facilities. One such platform is Yelp, a site that contains reviews about hospitals and other healthcare entities including nursing homes and dialysis centres. Now, Yelp is expanding the information it provides to visitors about patient satisfaction and hospital care.
Yelp is already well-known for its customer reviews of restaurants, retail stores and hotels. However, its healthcare reviews have also been growing rapidly and an article in the Washington Post reports that approximately 6 percent of user posts on Yelp were related to healthcare.
Yelp has now partnered up with nonprofit journalism outlet ProPublica and will include data from Medicare's patient satisfaction surveys directly on review pages for hospitals and other healthcare entities. The current expansion of information on Yelp will now include data from Medicare’s patient satisfaction surveys on the review pages for the hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Information and ratings regarding each hospital's emergency department wait times, quality of doctors' communication with patients and the noise level in patient rooms will also be available on the hospital's review page. Users will be able to see each category's significance and how the rating was calculated on that page.
While this information will not affect a hospital's rating on Yelp, Yep has stated that sharing of this information collected via ProPublica can be used to come up with additional, separate ratings for patient care.
Yelp will continue to add more information to its reviews and this information will be obtained from the data patients reported to Medicare. It is thus evident that healthcare facilities need to be more vigilant as patient opinions can now have more power than ever before. If a hospital is reviewed on Yelp, it may be a good idea to monitor the reviews as well as ensure patient satisfaction levels are high to get good feedback.
Source: The Washington Post
Image Credit: Flickr.com
