Big Data Contest Looks to Solve Healthcare Puzzles

Healthcare innovators looking to fuel their big data analytics dreams have a new source of inspiration – and money.

The Care Transformation Prize Series will provide at least three quarterly prizes of $100,000 to the teams that develop the best solutions to challenges to be selected by the public and vetted by a panel of judges.

If it sounds a little like the Heritage Health Prize, the winner of which will be announced this June, that's probably because like that other competition, the leader of the Care Transformation Prize Series is Richard Merkin, MD, president and CEO of Heritage Provider Network.

The new national contest is co-sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center, which announced the initiative this week with introductory remarks by BPC health project co-chair and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. The Advisory Board Company is also a co-sponsor.

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In a phone interview, Merkin said the new competition leverages the community of big-thinking scientists who were attracted to the original Heritage Health Prize.

"There are so many other issues in healthcare, so we decided to bring it to Washington to open up the questions that people want to know the answers to," Merkin says. "We are asking the country to ask questions that they may be interested in, such as what is the difference between prenatal care and low birth weight babies in Virginia versus Arkansas. Why is it that Connecticut might have a much lower knee replacement than Boston, or why do they do more hip replacements at Yale than they do at Harvard?"

"We're asking what questions America wants answered," he said.

Once the questions are in hand, a panel of judges will choose the ones to be answered by big data scientists and other entrants, Merkin says, and the answers will be addressed by the growing community of scientists brought together initially by interest in the Heritage Health Prize.

The data needed to answer these questions has already been collected and is just waiting for the right questions to be asked, Merkin says.

Merkin also addressed recent indications that, as laid out in the original competition rules, the Heritage Health Prize grand prize of $3 million may not be awarded in full this June. There is no guarantee that the competition for the grand prize will be extended beyond June.

Merkin likened the Heritage Prize, a data-mining, predictive-modeling competition to reduce avoidable hospital visits, to the Orteig Prize, a $25,000 award offered in 1919 to the first aviator to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, or vice-versa.

"Originally, no one flew transatlantically," Merkin says. "At the time they thought it was too hard, too dangerous, and actually people died trying." The contest was then extended, he notes.

The eventual 1927 winner, U.S. Air Mail pilot Charles Lindbergh, had minimal financial backing and experience, but gambled on a different approach to the challenge than other challengers, Merkin notes.

"He was successful, and started an entire new industry flying transatlantically," Merkin says.