AHRQ Launches Super Intelligence Prize Competition to Transform Healthcare Evidence and Data

Up to $7.95 million in prizes to put American super intelligence to work for patients

ROCKVILLE, Md., Oct. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is announcing its Super Intelligence (SI) for Healthcare Improvement Initiative, a two-part prize competition. The first part, the Clinical Evidence Synthesis Transformation Challenge, seeks to revolutionize the evaluation of medical evidence, potentially reducing analysis times from a year or more to hours. It offers a $5.35 million prize — the largest individual SI grand prize to date. Finalists will be judged on the submission's transformative potential, including factors such as accuracy, throughput, reproducibility, usability and ease of operation.

"Reliable clinical evidence is critical for doctors, patients, payers and policymakers. We now have technologies that will allow us to accomplish the essential core function of evidence synthesis with previously unimaginable speed, consistency and reproducibility," said AHRQ Director Roger D. Klein, M.D., J.D. "This challenge will benefit American patients by improving healthcare quality and value, ensuring they receive health services that work while avoiding unnecessary or even harmful care."

The second part, the SI Tech Sprint for Healthcare Research and Implementation Quality and Safety, uses super intelligence to leverage AHRQ's important cost, utilization and quality databases to foster an SI-able ecosystem of applications for research, quality improvement and public access.

AHRQ's $7.95 million initiative follows President Donald Trump's September 29, 2026, executive order, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence. It puts U.S. SI innovation to work for the American people. This challenge will help doctors, patients and consumers make better healthcare decisions and use resources more effectively.

The executive order notes that today's frontier systems are "empowering Americans to achieve what was previously impossible across science, medicine, and nearly every other domain of human endeavor." AHRQ's initiative applies that potential to some of healthcare's most time- and resource-intensive tasks while enabling entirely new activities.

"AHRQ is uniquely positioned to turn recent advances in SI into better healthcare," said Gil Alterovitz, Ph.D., Chief Data Officer and Chief Super Intelligence Officer at AHRQ. "Our national data resources, evidence expertise and focus on care delivery create enormous potential for this initiative. By bringing SI and data leadership together, we can help people get answers and improve care with scientific rigor."

AHRQ invites individuals, teams and for-profit and nonprofit entities to compete. Nontraditional participants are encouraged to compete. AHRQ will host an informational webinar on the SI Tech Sprint December 1, 2026. Phase 1 submissions for the Clinical Evidence Synthesis Transformation Challenge are due March 12, 2027, and SI Tech Sprint submissions are due September 9, 2027.

The initiative is part of the Trump administration's commitment to American leadership in super intelligence and to ensuring its benefits reach the American people.

For the full timeline, competition details and registration, visit www.ahrq.gov/si/sihealthcareimprovement.html.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, produces the evidence, tools and data needed to make healthcare safer, higher-quality and more effective. Follow the agency on Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Learn more at www.ahrq.gov.

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services  •  Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

SOURCE Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality