You Can Look Up Nursing Home Fines, ER Wait Times On Yelp!

Consumers have one more tool available to help in making informed health and long term care decisions. The website Yelp, which is perhaps best known for publishing crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses, is adding health-care data to its review pages for medical businesses to give consumers more access to government information on hospitals, nursing homes and dialysis clinics.

Consumers can now look up a hospital emergency room's average wait time, fines paid by a nursing home, or how often patients getting dialysis treatment are readmitted to a hospital because of treatment-related infections or other problems.

The review site is partnering with ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization based in New York. ProPublica compiled the information from its own research and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The data is for 4,600 hospitals, 15,000 nursing homes, and 6,300 dialysis clinics in the United States, and it will be updated quarterly.

Much of the information about hospitals, for example, is available on Medicare's Hospital Compare Web page. Yelp executives say the information is sometimes difficult to find and more difficult for consumers to understand.  Yelp is therefore adding the information to it's website in a usable consumer friendly format.