QFLU
www.nottingham.ac.uk/~mczqres/qflu.php Purpose
QFLU is a surveillance system that gathers information from electronic health records of patients with influenzalike illness. It is designed to support influenza planning and response. History and operational characteristics
Established in 2006, QFLU is the national clinical surveillance system for influenzalike illness of the Health Protection Agency in the United Kingdom. The QFLU surveillance system is designed to monitor the chronology, number, and distribution of influenzalike illness cases during annual influenza season. By daily monitoring the size and progression of an epidemic, the demographics of the affected population, and the vaccination uptake, health officials would have early warning of unusual cases and clusters of disease indicative of a severe influenza epidemic or pandemic. Distribution of vaccine and antiviral supplies, treatment guidelines, and other policy decisions would be informed by these analyses. Each day QFLU collects and analyzes National Health Service clinical data from more than 2,700 general practitioners who serve approximately 25% of the UK’s population (17 million people).35 It is the largest surveillance program of its kind in Europe. Participating practices submit aggregated data on clinical diagnoses and prescription drugs via their clinical practice computer systems; every evening QFLU extracts and analyzes these data. Data can be analyzed by country, region, or locality of the clinical practice, but to protect patient confidentiality, the only specific patient data collected by QFLU are age and sex. The QFLU dataset contains aggregated daily and weekly summaries of the following variables: incident cases of influenzalike illness, cumulative cases of influenzalike illness from the start of the flu season each year, high-risk patients requiring influenza vaccinations, patients receiving flu vaccinations from the start of the flu season, patients consulting a general practitioner or nurse about influenzalike illness, hospital admissions due to influenzalike illness, deaths of patients with influenzalike illness, patients prescribed influenza antiviral medications, and incident cases of pneumonia. QFLU was created by the University of Nottingham and EMIS, the UK’s source of computer systems for primary care, in collaboration with the Health Protection Agency. QFLU is closely affiliated with QRESEARCH, another automated disease surveillance system that collects real-time data on a wider variety of disease indicators, including gastrointestinal symptoms, heat stroke, and vaccine-preventable diseases. QRESEARCH covers about 450 general practices in the UK, and it is intended as a means of quickly identifying regional and national patterns on a variety of disease syndromes. Data from both QFLU and QRESEARCH are analyzed and published together in Communicable Disease Report Weekly, a free electronic public health bulletin created for England and Wales.35 Region/countries served
England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland Funding/budget/staff
Not available | 
