Yelp announced a new partnership with ProPublica to add health care stats and consumer opinion survey data to Yelp businesses pages for over 25,000 medical treatment facilities.

The information being used was compiled by ProPublica as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). It covers 4,600 hospitals, 15,000 nursing homes, and 6,300 dialysis clinics in the U.S. The data will be updated every quarter.

Users will see hover text on the business page that explains the stats. It will also show numbers of “serious deficiencies and fines per nursing home and emergency room wait times for hospitals.”

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman writes on the Yelp blog:

For example, West Kendall Baptist Hospital has better than average doctor communication and an average 33 minute ER wait time, Beachside Nursing Center currently has no deficiencies, and San Mateo Dialysis Center has a better than average patient survival rate.

Now the millions of consumers who use Yelp to find and evaluate everything from restaurants to retail will have even more information at their fingertips when they are in the midst of the most critical life decisions, like which hospital to choose for a sick child or which nursing home will provide the best care for aging parents.

Two years ago, Yelp started showing health scores on restaurant listings in San Francisco and New York City. In the meantime it has begun doing so in other areas as various municipalities have adopted the system. Last year, it was actually able to help health officials in New York find hundreds of cases of food borne illness. Early this year, Yelp formed an open data partnership with Socrata to distribute restaurant inspection information.

Yelp is calling all of this stuff along with its ongoing consumer alerts its “Consumer Protection Initiative,” and said it has “much more” planed. This includes more restaurant health scores and more work with ProPublica on other categories of information.

Earlier this week, Yelp revealed its new small business council, which consists of a group of small business who have been picked to represent businesses in their regions.

Image via Yelp (Flickr)