TY - JOUR T1 - Association of Over-The-Counter Pharmaceutical Sales with Influenza-Like-Illnesses to Patient Volume in an Urgent Care Setting A1 - Liu, Timothy Y. A1 - Sanders, Jason L. A1 - Tsui, Fu-Chiang A1 - Espino, Jeremy U. A1 - Dato, Virginia M. A1 - Suyama, Joe Y1 - 2013/03/21 N2 - We studied the association between OTC pharmaceutical sales and volume of patients with influenza-like-illnesses (ILI) at an urgent care center over one year. OTC pharmaceutical sales explain 36% of the variance in the patient volume, and each standard deviation increase is associated with 4.7 more patient visits to the urgent care center (p<0.0001). Cross-correlation function analysis demonstrated that OTC pharmaceutical sales are significantly associated with patient volume during non-flu season (p<0.0001), but only the sales of cough and cold (p<0.0001) and thermometer (p<0.0001) categories were significant during flu season with a lag of two and one days, respectively. Our study is the first study to demonstrate and measure the relationship between OTC pharmaceutical sales and urgent care center patient volume, and presents strong evidence that OTC sales predict urgent care center patient volume year round. JF - PLOS ONE JA - PLOS ONE VL - 8 IS - 3 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059273 SP - e59273 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0059273 ER -