MARINA DEL REY, Calif., April 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Dr.
Richard Merkin, President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network,
announced today the official launch of the $3 million dollar
Heritage Health Prize, the world’s largest predictive modeling
contest.
In celebrating the launch of the contest at the Data 2.0
Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Merkin challenged innovators with
an interest in data mining and analytics to enter the $3 million
prize saying, “We have an opportunity to globally change health
delivery and ensure a higher quality of care, while making
healthcare affordable for families and avoiding waste.”
Details outlining rules, official registration, judges and a 2
year participation time frame were also revealed at the Conference.
The initial data set was also released immediately after the
conference.
Contestants in the challenge will be provided with a data set
consisting of the de-identified medical records of patients
covering a specific time period, and will then be required to
predict who from that patient population went to the hospital
during the following year and how long they spent in the hospital.
HPN will award the $3 million prize (more than twice what is
paid for the Nobel Prize in medicine) to the team with the highest
level of predictive accuracy after the two year competition phase
concludes, assuming they have met the accuracy threshold.
Dr. Merkin also explained that the competition was to last at
least two years to ensure that the most accurate predictive
algorithm could be developed.
Joining Dr. Merkin at the conference was Michael Leavitt, former
Secretary of Health and Human Services and Governor of Utah, who
described the prize saying, “It is innovative concepts such as the
Heritage Health Prize that will help solve the health care crisis
facing our country.”
The Heritage Health prize has received global enthusiastic
interest from a diverse group of participants includin
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