Dive Brief:
- On Monday, Yelp announced a new feature that will help consumers make more informed healthcare choices.
- With the new feature, listings for healthcare organizations will include data about things like emergency room wait times, facility fines and reported deficiencies.
- The data is being gathered with the help of ProPublica, an investigative journalism nonprofit.
Dive Insight:
The new feature will be rolled out with the help of ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit investigative journalism/public interest organization. ProPublica will provide Yelp with healthcare data, some of which comes from public data sets and some that is unique to the organization. In exchange, Yelp will share some of its review data with ProPublica.
Luther Lowe, Yelp's vice president of public policy, told Wired that about 6% of the businesses currently being reviewed on Yelp are in the healthcare category. He said the new data will help users make more informed decisions about their healthcare choices.
“People aren’t typing ‘emergency room Santa Monica’ into Yelp for fun,” Lowe said. “They’re on their way to the hospital and trying to figure out which one has the shortest wait time.
“People are coming to Yelp to make these decisions, and it makes so much sense to put this government data in the context where people are actually going to rely on it," he said.