Opportunity  

Online rating websites like Yelp offer an opportunity for health care consumers to provide nuanced information about their experiences.    

Online reviews are unique in that they include feedback from patients as well as caregivers, family, and friends who do not have a voice in traditional systems of evaluating care. In addition, Yelp allows consumers to provide insight into their experience in an unstructured fashion, unlike in preassigned surveys or questionnaires. 

Intervention  

We conducted a study exploring more than 16,000 Yelp reviews of U.S. hospitals. Leveraging a natural language processing technique called latent Dirichlet allocation, we analyzed the text of the reviews and identified underlying topics.   

Impact  

We found that the content in Yelp narrative reviews mirrored many aspects of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey, the U.S. standard for evaluating patients’ experiences after hospitalization. In addition, we identified 12 domains covered in Yelp reviews that HCAHPS did not capture. These domains revealed new areas of importance for patients and caregivers. 

Our findings indicate that Yelp reviews can supplement and inform traditional patient-experience surveys, like HCAHPS, and contribute to patients’, providers’, and policy makers’ understanding and assessment of hospital quality. 

Since this initial study, we have continued to mine online ratings for insights that can be leveraged to improve health care delivery and experience. Learn about some of our key findings below. 

• Higher Yelp ratings of health care facilities correlated with lower mortality at the county level. Learn more.
• Skilled nursing facilities with the highest Yelp and Medicare Nursing Home Compare ratings had lower rehospitalization rates than those with the lower ratings. Learn more.
• Yelp reviews offered insight into opioid experiences and the challenges of pain management. Learn more. 
• We can identify acts of interpersonal racism in health care in online reviews. Learn more. 
• The single word most correlated to negative online hospital reviews was “told,” pointing to the importance of clear communication in health care settings. Learn more. 
• Online reviews of specialized drug treatment facilities identified drivers of patient satisfaction. Learn more. 
• Online reviews can help organizations identify what patients value in emergency department and urgent care center experiences, which can offer insights for improving acute care delivery. Learn more.
• Narrative themes found in online reviews of mental health treatment facilities provide information beyond what is currently collected through the United States National Mental Health Services Survey. Learn more.

Our long-term goal is to create an online database of Yelp hospital reviews for providers, researchers, and staff to search and explore – a space for individuals to gain further insight into customer perspectives. A searchable database of reviews may also lend insight into issues across institutions.