The announcement was made this morning at the 4th annual Health Datapalooza in Washington.
The announced interim winner is a team of former rivals, called Powerdot, who formed a coalition in October to compete as a unit. They are: David Vogel , chief scientist of Voloridge Investment Management, Juno Beach, Fla.; Dr. Randy Axelrod, executive vice president, Providence Health & Services, Renton, Wash.; Rie Johnson, an independent machine learning researcher from New York, Willem Mestrom, business intelligence specialist at Independer, an insurance negotiator in the Netherlands; Edward de Grijs, an engineer and software developer also from the Netherlands; Tong Zhang, a machine learning researcher at Rutgers University; and Phil Brierley, an analytics consultant and owner of Tiberius Data Mining, Australia. Vogel, Axelrod, Brierley and de Grijs accepted the $500,000 check on behalf of the group.
"We are so encouraged by the results seen in the last two years,” Merkin said in the news release. “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."
Thus far, contestants have received $730,000 in milestone prizes. At the close of the entry submission phase of the contest in April, there had been more than 39,000 entries.
Winners of another software development competition, co-sponsored by HPN and the not-for-profit Open mHealth, a $100,000 contest for mobile healthcare applications, are to be announced Tuesday at Health Datapalooza.
Merkin said the Heritage prize benchmark is to produce a data analytic system that would allow providers to prevent readmissions. “In those cases, you knew that those were the high-risk patients and you could intercede either by giving them more one-to-one attention, watching them more carefully, giving them more educational tools and special programs to try to keep them healthy and prevent them from a hospitalization.”
Merkin said there is no time deadline for awarding the prize.
“Our primary resource is passion,” he said. “I think with passion and focus you can accomplish anything. We're not going to limit the time. We're just going to wait for someone to do it.”
Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn
