New Report: How Yelp Can Help Patients Find Quality Hospitals

Yelp ratings correlated with health outcome measures.

NEW YORK, NY – Regardless of what changes Congress may make in the Affordable Care Act, patients will continue to face potentially high stakes financial decisions when choosing between providers. Information on cost-effectiveness and quality is especially critical for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers with high deductible health plans or plans with small networks of covered hospitals and physicians.

Yet reliable information on hospital quality can be difficult for the average patient to find. A new report from the Manhattan Institute finds that ratings of hospitals on Yelp can provide free, accurate, and easy to understand insight into the quality of hospital care provided in New York State.

Authors Paul Howard and Yevgeniy Feyman compare Yelp ratings to objective measures of hospital quality, such as preventable readmissions and mortality rates, and find that higher Yelp ratings correspond to higher quality. They argue that while Yelp shouldn’t be used as a sole predictor of hospital quality, their findings present an opportunity for patients to navigate the health care system more easily.

They recommend that New York policymakers explore simple reforms to help make social media reviews on hospital quality even more readily available to patients when they need to make important decisions about which insurance to buy, or which hospital to receive a surgery or elective procedure at.

Click here to read the full report.