Flu Near You allows individuals to volunteer to be a sentinel node of the syndromic surveillance (SyS) network. The platform has the potential to provide insight into the spread of influenza-like illness (ILI). CDC’s ILINet is the gold standard for tracking ILI at the national level, but does not track into the local level. Local health departments (LHD) frequently express a need for granular data specific to their jurisdictions. FNY attempts to meet this need by collecting and sharing data at the zip code level. Knowing how well FNY data correlates to ILINet data will give local health departments an important tool to communicate the arrival of influenza to their jurisdiction. However, there is significant skepticism at the quality of FNY data as compared to validated datasets.

Objective

Our objective is to provide evidence for the data quality of Flu Near You (FNY) by evaluating the national and Houston datasets against CDC ILI data.