Questioning the Yelp Effect: Mixed Methods Analysis of Web-Based Reviews of Urgent Cares.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Providers of on-demand care, such as those in urgent care centers, may prescribe antibiotics unnecessarily because they fear receiving negative reviews on web-based platforms from unsatisfied patients-the so-called Yelp effect. This effect is hypothesized to be a significant driver of inappropriate antibiotic prescribing, which exacerbates antibiotic resistance.

Objective

In this study, we aimed to determine the frequency with which patients left negative reviews on web-based platforms after they expected to receive antibiotics in an urgent care setting but did not.

Methods

We obtained a list of 8662 urgent care facilities from the Yelp application programming interface. By using this list, we automatically collected 481,825 web-based reviews from Google Ma

SUBMITTER: Hu D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8538031 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature