When you’re looking for a restaurant, you likely jump online, where a plethora of reviews will inform you about a particular establishment’s service, decor and food quality.

If you’re really into research, you can even go to the Department of Health’s “Inspection Health Portal” and check out the last time a particular establishment underwent an unannounced inspection for sanitation violations.

We might not look up the inspection reports before every meal, but knowing that they’re there — knowing that our government is doing its job to inspect for violations and then making it easy for us to have access to that information — is heartening.

So it remains a mystery why we can’t get this same level of commitment, transparency and service when it comes to the Hawaii Department of Health’s inspections of state-licensed care facilities serving about 12,000 elderly and disabled people.

There are two major obstacles here:

• The ridiculous lag time the Legislature granted before mandating unannounced inspections. (In legislation last year, lawmakers pushed back the start date of unannounced inspections to July 1, 2019.)

• The utter lack of detail and thorough reporting from DOH about the inspections it does do.

The latter point was highlighted last week when DOH released its annual report to the Legislature regarding the inspections it does for the roughly 1,700 care facilities it oversees. As Civil Beat’s Nathan Eagle reported Monday, it was all of four pages long — and that included a blank page and a cover page.

The lack of information would be laughable — seriously, who at DOH thought this was an adequate, professional report? — were it not for the foreboding last line, slipped in without any clarifying details.

“Overall,” it reads, “most inspections result in citations for noncompliance with regulations and all citations are required to be corrected by the facility before the facility receives their renewed license or certification.”

The fact that “most” inspections, even announced ones, result in citations is “not good,” according to state long-term care ombudsman John McDermott.

We’d like to expand on that sentiment: It’s flatly unacceptable.

Pretty much everyone (or rather, everyone not in the pocket of the care industry) agrees that unannounced inspections of care homes are long overdue. The unannounced visits help the Department of Health see a facility’s true colors — not just when it’s on its best behavior — and they are the most reliable way to uncover neglect and abuse.

Neither Rep. Della Au Belatti, who inserted the delay in requiring unannounced inspections, nor Keith Ridley, the DOH official responsible for the report, responded to Eagle’s requests for comments.

As Civil Beat has reported, Nona Mosman died in 2013 at a three-bed community care foster family home in Waipahu.The 88-year-old’s primary caregiver, Jennifer Polintan, was working another full-time job and leaving Mosman in the care of her father, who was unqualified to tend to her needs.

Mosman was supposed to be repositioned every two hours, but when a complaint against the care home was filed, prompting an unannounced visit, social workers found Mosman in soiled sheets with a softball-sized bed sore.

She died four days later of decubitus ulcers, which are caused by the pressure of lying in the same position for a prolonged period.

According to this latest report from DOH, only about 16 percent of inspections and visits last year were unannounced. Legislators finally did the right thing when they required unannounced inspections, but by needlessly delaying enforcement until 2019, they are putting some of our most vulnerable and defenseless citizens at risk.

As it stands, there is simply no way to know how many more people are in situations like Mosman.

For some reason, this has been an uphill battle since 2013 when legislation mandated posting care home inspections online — a mandate that has frequently gone unmet. There’s simply no reason this should be so hard. The online portal for food inspections, after all, was developed and operational in less than a year.

If we put that much effort into regulating our spam musubi (to ensure it is sold within the requisite four hours), then surely we can do more for our elderly and our disabled citizens.