This paper is in the following e-collection/theme issue:

Public Health Data Analytics (72) ePrescribing and Innovations in Pharmacies (45)

Published on in Vol 5, No 1 (2013):

Comparing Prescription Sales, Google Trends and CDC Data as Flu Activity Indicators

Comparing Prescription Sales, Google Trends and CDC Data as Flu Activity Indicators

Comparing Prescription Sales, Google Trends and CDC Data as Flu Activity Indicators

Authors of this article:

Avinash Patwardhan1 ;   David Lorber1
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    This study compared prescription sales data from a large retail pharmacy chain in the United States with Google Flu trends and US Outpatient ILI Surveillance Network data for 2007 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a flu activity indicator. For Google trends the correlation coefficient (Pearson ‘r’ ) for five years aggregate data (2007-2011) was 0.92 (95% CI, 0.90-0.94, P = 0.05) and for each of the five years between 2007 and 2011 were 0.85, 0.92, 0.91, 0.88, and 0.87 respectively. For CDC data the same was 0.97 (95% CI, 0.95-0.98, P = 0.05).