Finally, a reputable hospital rating website

AnalyticsMD pulls hospital ratings to help administrators improve operations

I have a love/hate relationship with online reviews. I can’t help but read them before I make a purchase decision, but oftentimes, I get frustrated with the quality of the reviews for consumer products. Sometimes a one-star rating is from someone who didn’t read the product’s specifications carefully enough, or because it arrived broken in the mail. Reviews like that don’t help me. The same goes for hospital and physician ratings. How can we really trust these people leaving reviews?

In comes AnalyticsMD, which Time has dubbed ‘Yelp for hospitals.’ This review site pulls information about a hospital’s emergency room, patient satisfaction and in-patient cost efficiency. People can enter hospitals and learn about their strengths, weaknesses, and see their overall letter grade.

The two co-founders of AnalyticsMD say that they had two goals in mind when they built this database. The first is to help hospital administrators see how they’re performing, both for themselves and compared to competitors. The second is to get both patients and health providers to demand quality and efficiency in healthcare.

The good news is that rather than focusing on the problems in hospitals, the site also provides information to administrators on how to solve common problems, such as scheduling conflicts and long wait times.

What do you think of this new hospital review site? Would you use it to see how your hospital is graded? Do you think it will be more effective than physician review sites? Or do you think it will cause more turmoil than actual good?