The winner of the competition will be announced at the fourth annual Health Datapalooza, June 3-4 in Washington, an event launched by the federal government in 2010 to promote the use of innovative health information technology and health data to improve quality of care. The IPA is a lead sponsor of Health Datapalooza.
HPN also is co-sponsoring, along with the not-for-profit Open mHealth, a $100,000 contest for mobile healthcare applications. Winners of the mobile application contest also will be awarded at Health Datapalooza.
With all the hype about Big Data, healthcare data analytics is a field already crowded with commercial software developers and consultants, so the question is, why not just buy data analytics software off-the-shelf?
“I just think, philosophically, I believe in incentivized competition,” said Richard Merkin, president and CEO of Heritage Provider Network. Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight was linked to a $25,000 prize, while the canning industry was catalyzed in response to a $5,000 French government competition for food preservation techniques, Merkin said.
Heritage vetted the idea of a competition in health data analytics with an advisory group of companies that included several health plans and IT heavyweights such as Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft and Intel Corp., and “we noticed that the way people in healthcare approach data was completely different” than how it is dealt with in other industries, Merkin said.
“We thought this would be disruptive innovation,” he said. “The kinds of pattern recognition that these data analysts are creating is just completely different than what we've found in healthcare.” The data scientists drawn to the $3 million, winner-take-all prize are “the best around,” from 40 different countries, and most of the contestants “were not in healthcare.”
So far, the contest has paid out $230,000 in “milestone” prizes, and it has cost about another $1 million for administration, Merkin said.
At the close of the entry submission phase of the contest April 4, the total number of entries had topped 39,000, he said.
Merkin, who funded the contest in part out of his own pocket, with support from HPN's member groups, said it wasn't difficult rounding up the organization's leadership to support the effort.
“We figure that there are tens of billions of dollars that will be saved, and when we expressed how you can change the world, it was not challenging to come up with this.”
