The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that one in six Americans get sick from a foodborne illness every year, with 3,000 deaths and 128,000 hospitalizations annually.
When it comes to eating out at restaurants, consumers often depend on municipal health department inspection scores to assess whether a food establishment is safe to visit.
But each city has a different scoring system. Some use letter grades, others use a color-coded system, and still others implement different numerical scales.
And while some cities publish the restaurant scores on government websites, few people know how to access the information or would bother to try.
Data software company Socrata aims to resolve both problems at once with a program they’ve developed in partnership with local governments and Yelp.com, the customer review website. Socrata will translate the health inspection score into a standardized, universal 0 to 100 score, then post on Yelp each restaurant’s score. The program is called LIVES, for Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification.
