This project demonstrates that EHRs can improve surveillance capabilities by streamlining and standardizing reporting. This can help to establish a more sophisticated reporting tool using gold standard methods on a larger scale, which will in turn improve public health by providing information on the most common circulating virus at the time of diagnosis, and especially in the event of outbreaks such as pandemic H1N1. In addition, longer term longitudinal use of EHRs for this type of surveillance can determine whether the pattern observed one season is repeated the next.