Yelp rankings of medical amenities might expose neighborhood health inequities
December 03, 2021
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Source/Disclosures

Disclosures: 
Neither Merchant nor Stokes report any suitable financial disclosures. Please see the study for all other authors’ appropriate fiscal disclosures. 
Counties with important health and fitness care amenities that had lessen ratings on Yelp also experienced higher mortality fees, knowledge showed.
“Patient experience and fulfillment with health and fitness treatment are increasingly recognized as crucial actions of health and fitness care high-quality, but data on these components are fewer extensively gathered,” Daniel Stokes, MD, a researcher with the Penn Medication Middle for Digital Well being and an internal medicine resident at UCLA Overall health, and colleagues wrote. “Patient knowledge might also be related with county-amount mortality, but people associations have not nevertheless been very well explored.”


The scientists performed a retrospective, population-based, cross-sectional research of Yelp effectiveness reviews for 95,120 critical wellbeing care services in 1,301 U.S. counties from Jan. 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2019. Critical well being care services ended up described as those that supplied providers that Marketplace well being insurance policy strategies ought to deal with: ambulatory patient products and services emergency services hospitalization being pregnant, maternity and newborn care psychological overall health and substance use ailment solutions, which includes behavioral overall health treatment method prescription prescription drugs rehabilitative and habilitative solutions and gadgets laboratory services preventive and wellness solutions and continual condition management and oral and eyesight treatment for young children.
The results, posted in JAMA Network Open up, indicated that at the county level, a one particular-issue boost in a mean Yelp ranking was linked to a suggest age-adjusted minimize of 18.05 deaths for each 100,000 people (P < .001). The mean county-level rating of the analyzed facilities across the study period, with one being the worst and five being the best, was 2.9 stars.
The researchers also noted that words related to time, such as “minutes,” “hours,” “finally,” “waiting” and “schedules” words to describe payment, including “money,” “insurance” and “pay” and words related to interactions with other people, such as “rude,” “tell” or “told” appeared more frequently in one-star reviews in counties with high mortality. On the contrary, words such as “friendly,” “nice” and “staff” were used more frequently in five-star reviews in counties with high mortality.
In a press release, Stokes said the results show that “how patients feel about the care they are receiving has an impact on how they engage with health care and, in turn, their own health and well-being.”
“Ideally this democratization of information can help us to improve health care for all and reduce our blind spots,” Raina Merchant, MD, director of the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health, said in the release.
References:
Healthcare.gov. What Marketplace health insurance plans cover. https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/what-marketplace-plans-cover/. Accessed Nov. 15, 2021.
Stokes DC, et al. JAMA Netw Open. 2021doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.27799.
Yelp star ratings on health care facilities may reveal county-level death rate disparities. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/yelp-star-ratings-may-reveal-county-level-death-rate-disparities. Published Oct. 19, 2021. Accessed Nov. 15, 2021.