title: The relationship between commercial website ratings and traditional hospital performance measures in the USA.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Our goal was to compare hospital scores from the most widely used commercial website in the USA to hospital scores from more systematic measures of patient experience and outcomes, and to assess what drives variation in the commercial website scores.
  
  
  METHODS
  For a national sample of US hospitals, we compared scores on Yelp.com, which aggregates website visitor ratings (1-5 stars), with traditional measures of hospital quality. We calculated correlations between hospital Yelp scores and the following: hospital percent high ratings (9 or 10, scale 0-10) on the 'Overall' item on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey; hospital individual HCAHPS domain scores (eg, nurse communication, pain control); hospital 30-day mortality; and hospital 30-day readmission rates.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Of hospitals reporting HCAHPS (n=3796), 962 (25%) had scores on Yelp. Among hospitals with >5 Yelp ratings, the correlation of percent high ratings between Yelp and HCAHPS was 0.49 (p<0.001). The percent high ratings within each HCAHPS domain increased monotonically with increasing Yelp scores (p≤0.001 for all domains). Percent high ratings in Yelp and HCAHPS were statistically significantly correlated with lower mortality for myocardial infarction (MI; -0.19 for Yelp and -0.13 for HCAHPS) and pneumonia (-0.14 and -0.18), and fewer readmissions for MI (-0.17 and -0.39), heart failure (-0.31 and -0.39), and pneumonia (-0.18 and -0.27).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These data suggest that rater experiences for Yelp and HCAHPS may be similar, and that consumers posting ratings on Yelp may observe aspects of care related to important patient outcomes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, University of California San Francisco, 3333 California St. Suite 265, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA. bardachn@peds.ucsf.edu
authors.forename: Naomi S
authors.initials: NS
authors.lastname: Bardach
authors.forename: Renée
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Asteria-Peñaloza
authors.forename: W John
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Boscardin
authors.forename: R Adams
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Dudley
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003132:Commerce / Q000145:classification; D003256:Community Participation; D005260:Female; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006742:Hospital Bed Capacity / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006761:Hospitals / Q000145:classification / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D010359:Patient Readmission; D018802:Patient-Centered Care / Q000592:standards; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care; D012944:Social Support; D014481:United States