The nature of evaluating real world effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of influenza vaccine programs is notoriously complex. This is driven by the large number of environmental level, population level, host level, and viral level factors that all cross-interact. The availability of large amounts administrative and clinical health data, as well as, advancement of computing power provides unique opportunities to design analyses plans to better understand the relationships between all the aforementioned factors. In this talk I will highlight a few examples of where industry – academic collaborations were successful at advancing knowledge on some critical questions in this area.