Reviews of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital

In case you’ve been living in Tahiti the last few weeks (it’s a magical place), Texas Health Presbyterian is the hospital in Dallas where Thomas Duncan, a native of Liberia, became the first person diagnosed with Ebola on US soil on September 29. By their own admission, the hospital made mistakes in the way it handled Duncan and the situation.

Let’s take a look at how Yelp and Google+ are handling the reviews coming in from all over the country from people who’ve never stepped in Texas Health Presbyterian. All data is as of October 24, 2014.

Yelp
25 reviews showing total.
2 reviews since September 29th. They are positive, and look to be legit.
7 reviews filtered. None of these since September 29th.
8 reviews removed for violating content guidelines or ToS. 6 of these are since September 29th.

Google+
68 reviews total.
37 reviews since September 29th. 26 are clearly from non-patients. 7 appear likely legit. 4 are hard to tell.

I’d love to look at more review services, but there just weren’t any others that had numbers worth looking at for Texas Health.

In any case, here’s what these numbers say to me…

I’ve certainly been critical of Yelp’s reviews in the past (both on this blog and definitely on panels), but I like their approach. Assuming the data is accurate and compete, showing what has been filtered and what has been removed is appreciated. I’d prefer it if I can see the actual reviews that were removed, but I can understand why Yelp doesn’t show them.

And also to Yelp’s credit, there are no reviews showing that don’t appear to be from an actual patient or family member of a patient. I looked at Yelp’s review corpus a week or so ago, and there were several that didn’t appear to be legit, but I assume these are now in the Reviews Removed bucket. I suspect some of the filtering is being done by hand, but they seem to be giving it real effort.

Google gives no information on what reviews have been filtered. For all we know, Google may have filtered out hundreds of them. I doubt it’s that many, but they give us nothing to base things upon.

What I can look at is the reviews they show. 70% of their reviews since September 29th are clearly illegitimate. That’s appalling.

Especially after Google has publicly and clearly stated that they want Reviews not General Commentary.