Heritage Health and Kaggle have teamed up to create the biggest data science competition thus far: the Heritage Health Prize, which challenges competitors to build a statistical model to predict the number of days a person is likely to spend in hospital over the next year, based on (anonymized) factors such as demographics, medical visits and treatments, and other factors:
Heritage launched the $3 million Heritage Health Prize with one goal in mind: to develop a breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations. Heritage believes that incentivized competition – one that includes the involvement of those with passionate minds that don't know what can't be done – is the best way to achieve the radical breakthroughs and innovations necessary to reform our health care system.
The previous largest prediction competition, the Netflix prize, offered a prize of $1 million to the eventual winner. The winner of the Heritage Health Prize will receive three times that amount when the competition concludes in approximately 2 years ... and we'll learn more from the exercise than how to avoid a bad movie. Plus, as announced this week at Predictive Analytics World, progress prizes will also be awarded to the top 2 interim leaders at the 6-month, 12-month and 18-month marks for a total of $230,000 in milestone prizes. This competition will be hosted on prediction-competition site Kaggle.com, where competitors will be able to see their progress in real-time leaderboards as they vie for the prizes. And given that most Kaggle competitors use R, this is a great opportunity for R users to put their data analysis skills to find the factors thet will keep us out of hospital ... and maybe win some significant prize-money, too.
The competition will open on April 4, and you can pre-register at the link below.
Heritage Health Prize: Launching April 4
This is all well and good, except that the real purpose is to provide health insurance companies with a reliable means to exclude people who appear healthy, yet will likely develop (expensive) health problems within a short time frame.
For insurers, the best part about this is that rescission (revoking of coverage after a person has paid premiums for a long while) is the standard means of win-win denial of health care. After Joe Q. Public has paid into MegaConglomco's coffers for 50 years or so, he starts to show signs that he'll develop, say, myelodysplasia, or perhaps his wife Jane will develop breast cancer. Drugs for those are expensive, so if you work at Megaconglomco, you issue a rescission notice to Joe and Jane, informing them that their failure to notify Megaconglomco of Joe's stubbed toe and Jane's high school acne means that they had pre-existing conditions. Therefore, thanks for your half-century of premiums, please go away and die quietly so we don't have to pay for your Vidaza and Avastin.
Ch-ching! Megaconglomco's CEO can now sail a 135-foot yacht in the annual regatta, not some paltry 100-foot deal like those chumps from Mutual of AllFarm. Everybody wins!
Well, except for the insured. But they're peasants, if they were real Americans, they would have been born to wealthy and/or powerful parents. Isn't predictive analytics wonderful?
Plus, this frees up cash to defend against lawsuits and pay for astroturfing campaigns on the local news, when Joe and Jane's daughter is denied a life-saving (and readily available) kidney transplant.
You, too, can help Megaconglomco to "create jobs" (in India), be "environmentally friendly" (by reducing the population), and "control costs" (by killing people instead of paying for health care). And it's all Open Source, so Megaconglomco won't even have to pay you a license fee!
Posted by: Jay Goff | March 17, 2011 at 11:11
What is "$3.2M in prizes"?
That could be anything... $3.2M worth in cash, oatmeal, pigs..?
Posted by: LoveSASLove | March 18, 2011 at 07:34
@LoveSASLove, what an odd comment! It's clear from the announcement that the prizes will be paid in cash, not livestock.
Posted by: David Smith | March 18, 2011 at 08:58
@Jay, agreed that recission is an evil practice on the part of health insurers, but Heritage Health is a *provider* network, not an insurer. Seems like they'd stand to lose, not gain, if fewer people went to hospital.
Posted by: David Smith | March 18, 2011 at 09:01
Mr. Goff is probably referring to the Otto S. Raddatz story who ultimately got his treatment. As for the CEO divide the compensation by employees or subscribers and you'll see it isn't that much.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125314896131518267.html
http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/Media/file/Hearings/Oversight/061609IndividualHealthCarePlanRescissions/Testimony/Raddatz.pdf
Posted by: Ian Random | April 03, 2011 at 22:58
Heritage Health and Kaggle's idea about the statistical model that would predict the number of days a person is likely to spend in hospital would help a lot people financially. Patients, including their families, would be able to calculate their hospital bills since they would know how long they would stay inside the hospital.
actos bladder cancer.
Posted by: Louise Clark | April 24, 2012 at 11:37