Heritage Health Prize Awards $500K

For its work so far on building a model that predicts how many days a patient will spend in the hospital, one team has been awarded a half million dollar cash progress prize. Competition for the Heritage Health Prize continues.

Continuing a trend of rewarding developers for building breakthrough technology solutions to unlock population health management from freely available, de-identified medical data, The Heritage Prize announced a $500,000 prize Monday at the Datapalooza IV conference.

Heritage Provider Network officials presented the cash award to the current leading team, POWERDOT, for its work on a predictive analytics challenge related to hospital admissions and length of stay.

HPN officials said they will continue the grand $3 million Heritage Health Prize competition until one of the leading teams reaches or exceeds the required benchmark.

"We are so encouraged by the results seen in the last two years, we will continue the competition and allow the top eligible leading teams access to an even broader data set to try to accelerate a successful benchmark performance by one of the teams," said Richard Merkin MD, president and CEO of Heritage Provider Network.

See Also: $3 Million Prize Offered to Solve Hospital Admissions Puzzle

That broader data will include socio-economic status and additional pharmacy and lab data originally held back due to concerns that the data could be de-anonymized, Heritage officials said.

"There's a variety of additional claims and medical record data, still anonymized to that extent, so the patients will only be a number, but a broader set of clinical information that I think will make this much more usable," explained Mark Wagar, president of Heritage Medical Systems. "Those factors are important, as long as you can keep the personal aspect anonymous. They're not going to be able to download [such] data. They'll have to go to a HIPAA-secure Web site."

The prize challenges entrants to create an algorithm that predicts how many days a patient will spend in the hospital. Created, developed and sponsored by Merkin, President and CEO of HPN, the goal of the prize is to decrease the number of avoidable hospitalizations, saving the U.S. more than $40 billion in preventable hospitalization costs.

See Also: $3 Million Health Puzzler Draws to a Close

POWERDOT is comprised of data miners, researchers, information analysts, and a hedge fund manager in what Heritage describes as a global union of the world's best data scientists. The team members are former rivals and cash progress prize winners who completed independently at first, but then joined forces last October. They are: 

• David Vogel, chief scientist of Voloridge Investment Management;
• Randy Axelrod, MD, executive vice president of the 32-hospital Providence Health & Services system;
• Rie Johnson, a machine learning researcher;
• Willem Mestrom, business intelligence specialist at Independer, based in the Netherlands; 
• Edward de Grijs, an engineer and software developer also from the Netherlands;
• Tong Zhang, a machine learning researcher;
• Phil Brierley, analytics consultant with Tiberius Data Mining, based in Australia

Vogel, Axelrod, Brierley and de Grijs accepted the $500,000 check on behalf of the group at the announcement.