With the defeat of the American Health Care Act, Republican health care reform faces an uncertain future. Whatever next steps Congress and the Trump Administration choose to take, patients will need to become more informed and engaged consumers of health care; and insurers, providers, and policymakers will need to communicate data on quality and cost more clearly and concisely.

To help make sense of it all, patients are increasingly turning to fellow patients—via reviews posted on popular websites such as Yelp, Healthgrades, and Zocdoc. Yelp's star ratings, for example, are easy to follow and free of charge. But not all medical providers are happy about this. Social media reviews, they warn, often don't reflect objective quality metrics, such as readmission and mortality rates.

Should patients be encouraged to seek the opinions of non-experts when making critical health-care decisions? Please join us for an MI health-care symposium on social media and medicine, with a special focus on whether Yelp reviews of New York State hospitals offer a reliable guide to quality and cost.

PANEL

Yevgeniy Feyman, Senior Research Assistant, Harvard School of Public Health
Robin Gelburd, President, FAIR Health
Paul Howard, Director and Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Michael Luca, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

212-599-7000
communications@manhattan-institute.org