A New Challenge Looks for a Smarter Algorithm to Improve Healthcare

Starting on April 4, the Heritage Health Prize (@HPNHealthPrize) competition, funded by the Heritage Provider Network (HPN), will ask the world's scientists to submit an algorithm that will help them to identify patients at risk of hospitalization before they need to go to the emergency room.

"This competition is to literally predict the probability that someone will go to the hospital in the next year," said Anthony Goldbloom at the Strata Conference. Goldbloom is the founder and CEO of Kaggle, the Australian data mining company that is running the competition for HPN. "The idea is to rank how at risk people are, go through the list and figure out which of the people on the list can be helped," he said.

If successful, HPN estimates that the algorithm produced by this competition could save the country billions in healthcare costs. In the process, the development and deployment of the algorithm could provide the rest of the healthcare industry with a successful model for reducing costs.