Heritage Provider Network (HPN) will continue to award their $3 million Heritage Health Prize as announced at the Health Datapalooza Forum held in Washington D.C on June 3-4, 2013. So far, this big data challenge has attracted more than 30,000 entries worldwide as teams of data scientists have worked to develop models using health industry data. The big data Heritage Health Prize is aimed at tackling the nearly $40 billion the nation spends on avoidable hospitalizations.
It is estimated that roughly 70 million people are admitted to the hospital every year in the U.S. By understanding the causes of these hospitalizations and the ability to predict outcomes, HPN hopes to dramatically reduce the number of people who are hospitalized in the U.S. every year through proactive care delivery and timely interventions empowered by data.
At the Health Datapalooza event, HPM presented POWERDOT, a team of data scientists participating in the competition with a $500,000 prize as an award for their current status as challenge leader.
“I am very happy to be awarding POWERDOT this prize for their leading team effort,” said Dr. Richard Merkin, President and CEO of HPN. POWERDOT is comprised of data miners, researchers, information analysts, and a hedge fund manager.
The Heritage Health Prize is one of a number of competitions Dr. Merkin is sponsoring in HPN’s ongoing effort to spur innovation in harnessing big data to reduce costs. “We are so encouraged by the results seen in the last two years that we will continue the competition and allow the top eligible teams to have access to an even broader data set to try to accelerate a successful benchmark performance by one of the teams.”
“We hope our methodologies developed during the competition are utilized to identify preventable health risk more accurately while supporting universal improved clinical outcomes, access, and cost,” said David Vogel, POWERDOT team captain.