ILINet is used nationwide by sentinel healthcare providers for reporting weekly outpatient visit numbers for influenza-like illness to CDC. The Florida Department of Health receives urgent care center (UCC) data through ESSENCE from participating facilities. Seminole County is unique in that its four sentinel providers located in separate UCCs report into both systems, and all their discharge diagnoses are available through ESSENCE. However, the reported number of patients being discharged from those providers with diagnoses of influenza is not equivalent to the number of cases reported into ILINet. Data from the two systems were therefore compared both among and between the individual sentinel providers in order to determine the extent of the variation over four influenza seasons.
Objective
To compare influenza-like illness (ILI) data reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet) with discharge diagnosis data for influenza from the same reporting source obtained through the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE) in Seminole County, Florida.