The health sector is a heavy adopter of many cloud services, but in an industry so large there’s still a number of ways virtual services can affect and improve related organizations.  As in other sectors, data analysis and integrated cloud services can help a health organization run more efficiently, applying  cost savings all around. The Heritage Provider Network is organizing a contest to explore some ways data analysis can help the health sector, offering a prize for the creation of an algorithm that will predict hospitalizations by using a pre-defined set of patient data sources. The contest’s inspiration comes from a recent study that demonstrated that over $30 billion was spent on unnecessary hospital admissions in 2006.

Robert O’Keefe, Senior HPN Executive:

The goal of the Heritage Health Prize is to challenge the competitors to solve a societal problem that will help realign the focus of health care delivery from sick care to true “health care.” We believe that including progress prizes will help motivate people to rise to the challenge.  And, once a team or individual successfully meets the challenge, we will use the resulting algorithm to provide better care to our patients.

The Heritage Provider Network is offering a prize worth of $3 million in addition to progress prizes totaling $230,000. The prizes will be awarded to leading teams along the contest: for the six month mark the organizer is offering $30,000 to the first place team, and $20,000 fo second place; for the 12 month mark the organizer is offering $50,000 to the top winner, and $30,000 to the second place team; for the 18 month mark the first place team is granted $60,000 and the second team is granted $40,000.

The aim of the competition is to address issues in the health system that will benefit both patients (by screening their data and analyzing it for the purpose of identifying vulnerable patients and proactively preventing illness) and health care practitioners and/or providers and insurance companies as well (by reducing the number of treated patients through a preventive approach.)

The organizers announced that the competition phase will begin on the 4^th of April, and noted that the project is similar to the Netflix competition held out between 2007 and 2009 by its prediction approach. The Netflix competition has 50,000 registrations and participants has to manage big data in order to  predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings.