Heritage Health Prize Will Include $230,000 in Progress Prizes

MARINA DEL REY, Calif., March 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Richard Merkin, President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network, announced today that the $3 million Heritage Health Prize, the world's largest predictive modeling contest, will also include progress prizes totaling $230,000.

Details were revealed at the Predictive Analytics World Conference in San Francisco. The progress prizes will be awarded to teams leading the competition at various milestones: $50,000 to the top two teams at the six month mark, (split as $30,000, $20,000),$80,000 to the top two teams at the twelve month mark (split as $50,000, $30,000) and $100,000 to the top two teams at the eighteen month mark (split at $60,000, $40,000).

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 year following the start date. HPN will award the $3 million prize (more than twice what is paid for the Nobel Prize in medicine) to the first participant or team that achieves the required level of predictive accuracy.

"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'," said Robert O'Keefe, Senior HPN Executive, speaking at the PAW Conference. "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 Health Prize competition will launch on www.kaggle.com on Apr 4, 2011.

Read more.