Considering outbreak intensity, we show that sites chosen by our approach outperform the sites used by the IDPH. In other words, we can provide a more accurate representation of disease burden during an influenza season. However, our approach does not provide a substantial difference in the detection of the start, peak and end of the influenza season. In addition, when using the noise values generated by the EM algorithm to analyze the minimal number of sites needed to estimate the timing of the influenza season, our results were highly influenced by both the number of different ICD-9 codes considered and the number of cases considered.