Yup, you read that headline right. Yelp, the website a majority of people have gone to for reviews of local restaurants and eateries, is now expanding their directory to include healthcare data, too.
The company has formally announced that more than 25,000 hospitals, nursing homes, and dialysis clinics in the United States that are listed on the site will now include additional data beyond user reviews, and this information will come from ProPublica, a New York-based nonprofit, and Medicare.gov.
Among some of the new information to included: average emergency room wait times at hospitals, whether the staff is friendly, and if the rooms are quiet.
At nursing homes, Yelp will include information like how many free beds are currently available, and whether the federal government has fined the establishment for not meeting certain standards.
These updates are available on the desktop version of Yelp for now, but will be coming to its mobile app in the near future.
“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,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman explained in a company blog post.
For those curious, 6% of all businesses checked out by users fall under the health category, so the company’s dive into this particular field is not a blind move, it’s something they consider increasingly relevant to their readership.
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