Background: Flu Near You (FNY) is an online participatory syndromic surveillance system that collects health-related information. In this article, we summarized the healthcare-seeking behavior of FNY participants who reported influenza-like illness (ILI) symptoms.
Methods: We applied inverse probability weighting to calculate age-adjusted estimates of the percentage of FNY participants in the United States who sought health care for ILI symptoms during the 2015-2016 through 2018-2019 influenza season and compared seasonal trends across different demographic and regional subgroups, including age group, sex, census region, and place of care using adjusted χ 2 tests.
Results: The overall age-adjusted percentage of FNY participants who sought healthcare for ILI symptoms varied by season and ranged from 22.8% to 35.6%. Across all seasons, healthcare seeking was highest for the <18 and 65+ years age groups, women had a greater percentage compared with men, and the South census region had the largest percentage while the West census region had the smallest percentage.
Conclusions: The percentage of FNY participants who sought healthcare for ILI symptoms varied by season, geographical region, age group, and sex. FNY compliments existing surveillance systems and informs estimates of influenza-associated illness by adding important real-time insights into healthcare-seeking behavior.
Keywords: citizen science; digital epidemiology; healthcare-seeking behavior; influenza surveillance; influenza-like illness; respiratory illness.
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.