Nowadays, before you head to a restaurant for an evening of gorging, you are likely to check out ratings of the place using an online tool such as Yelp! Yet, are you able to look up ratings of a hospital before heading there to receive care?

Admittedly (no pun intended), evaluating hospitals is nowhere near as straightforward as evaluating restaurants and the downside of erroneous evaluations is much lower when looking at restaurants. Still, you can use the following two sites to get some sense of how hospitals in your area are performing on some of the more widely accepted metrics. The metrics used by these sites are a good mix of process and outcomes. Check them out!

• Medicare’s hospital compare site
• Leapfrog’s hospital safety score