Predicting Influenza Waves With Health Insurance Data

In the recent years, many of the most developed countries have started to develop influenza surveillance systems, because influenza is the last of the classic plagues of the past, which still has to be brought under control and because influenza causes a lot of costs. Efforts have been undertaken on the basis of data from health centres. An alternative is to develop surveillance nets. General practitioners voluntary send reports about the influenza situation in their practise. We have developed a method to predict influenza waves on the basis of health insurance data. In this paper, we introduce different data sources and ideas how to predict influenza waves. We summarise our method, and the main part of the paper deals with first experimental results.