In the United States, Google Trends has identified a remarkably close relationship between the number of people searching for flu-related topics and the number of people who actually have flu symptoms.
While not every person searching for “flu” is actually sick, a pattern apparently emerges when selected flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.
For the United States, Google compared its query counts with data the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often these search queries occur, Google Trends has shown how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States. Their results have been published in Nature.
Google is now running a similar project on Swine Flu (H1N1) to spot outbreak concentrations by state within Mexico. You can see the results in a graph on their website.
Filed Under: News & Careers
Tags: Google Trends, Swine flu
About the Author
From sports journalist to editor of an international trade magazine to Marketing Director for 3 companies before founding WBK Marketing, eventually one of the 50 largest promotional marketing agencies in America. Dale has pioneered "contextual marketing" for successful brands at P&G, Pepsi, Disney, Toshiba, Compaq, Imation, 3M and many regional hospitals and healthcare insurers.
“From my days in college as a pre-med student and working as a transporter for Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, to developing marketing programs for hospitals and health insurers, I have always had a passion for how science and medicine can help bring sick people back to health. Hospitals are incredibly complex organizations, with two large clinical teams (doctors and nurses) and many highly skilled specialists and therapists. There are times when various groups working in medical centers have opposing view points that can lead to dissonance, which at the extreme can potentially impair patient safety and quality outcomes. The work we do at Compass Clinical Consulting guides many of these hospitals through contentious issues, process failure or breakdown with a negative impact on financial stability. Our department of education and information services has been assembled to produce high-value content for hospital leaders. Our goal is to help these leaders transform their organizations into better hospitals by reducing the cost of delivering safe, quality healthcare.”
Dale has been an active blogger since 2004 when he launched The Perfect Customer Experience (www.perfectcem.com); recently recognized as one of Top 20 CRM blogs and on healthcare improvement (www.better-hospitals.com) where we now communicate about issues that impact making better American hospitals.
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