By Klint Finley

Yelp is probably best known for its restaurant reviews, but founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons were more concerned with how to find a good doctor online than where to grab a decent meal when they started the company in 2004. Today Yelp announced a new feature that gets back to those roots. All listings for hospitals, nursing homes and dialysis clinics now include data such as average emergency room times, fines a facility may have paid, and serious deficiencies that have been reported.

The new feature is the result of a partnership with ProPublica, the non-profit investigative journalism outfit. Yelp vice president of public policy Luther Lowe describes the arrangement as a two-way street. ProPublica provides Yelp with its data—some of which is gleaned from public data sets provided by the federal government, and some of which is unique to the organization. In exchange, Yelp will provide ProPublica with some of its own review data.

It may seem like an odd pairing. ProPublica has mostly partnered with high-brow news organizations like NPR, The New York Times and Time to produce lengthy investigative journalism pieces, not app makers that aren’t associated with news. But it makes sense that an organization dedicated to informing the public would bring its data to where the readers are.

Where People Can See It

It makes plenty of sense for Yelp as well. Lowe says that about 6 percent of the businesses reviewed on the site are in the health care category, but the new data will help users make more informed decisions about the facilities they choose. “People aren’t typing ‘emergency room Santa Monica’ into Yelp for fun,” Lowe says. “They’re on their way to the hospital and trying to figure out which one has the shortest wait time.

“People are coming to Yelp to make these decisions, and it makes so much sense to put this government data in the context where people are actually going to rely on it.”

Providing more quantitative data could also help improve perceptions of Yelp’s reliability. Individual reviews might not be representative of a hospital or health care facility’s overall record. Plus the company has been plagued by accusations that it gives advertisers preferable treatment when screening reviews. Every lawsuit filed on the issue has been dismissed before ever reaching a trial, but the allegations still haunt the company. Then there are the cases of activists flooding listings, such as the page of the dentist accused of killing Cecil the lion, with fake reviews, leaving readers to wonder if any given review is really based on experience or if the reviewer just had an axe to grind.

Lowe stands by the aggregate quality of its reviews—and so do the site’s users, judging by its enduring popularity. But surely adding more quantitative data won’t hurt.

Lowe says the company hopes to add more such data feeds to its listings in the future. The company already includes scores from health inspectors on restaurant listings in 12 different cities and counties, including Los Angeles.