Heritage Provider Network Announces the Official Launch of the $3 million Dollar Heritage Health Prize

MARINA DEL REY, Calif., April 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Richard Merkin, President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network, announced today the official launch of the $3 million dollar Heritage Health Prize, the world's largest predictive modeling contest.

In celebrating the launch of the contest at the Data 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Merkin challenged innovators with an interest in data mining and analytics to enter the $3 million prize saying, "We have an opportunity to globally change health delivery and ensure a higher quality of care, while making healthcare affordable for families and avoiding waste."

Details outlining rules, official registration, judges and a 2 year participation time frame were also revealed at the Conference. The initial data set was also released immediately after the conference.

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 following year and how long they spent in the hospital.  HPN will award the $3 million prize (more than twice what is paid for the Nobel Prize in medicine) to the team with the highest level of predictive accuracy after the two year competition phase concludes, assuming they have met the accuracy threshold.  

Dr. Merkin also explained that the competition was to last at least two years to ensure that the most accurate predictive algorithm could be developed.

Joining Dr. Merkin at the conference was Michael Leavitt, former Secretary of Health and Human Services and Governor of Utah, who described the prize saying, "It is innovative concepts such as the Heritage Health Prize that will help solve the health care crisis facing our country."

The Heritage Health prize has received global enthusiastic interest from a diverse group of participants including individuals at Google, Accenture, Bank of America, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Department of Energy, Britain's National Health Service, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Ben Gurian University, and the Cleveland and Mayo Clinics. Additionally, entries have come from as far away as the Ukraine, Poland and Portugal, according to Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, the company running the competition.

Heritage Health Prize Advisory Board members include Arvind Narayanan, Stanford University; Charles Elkan, UC San Diego and Netflix prize judge and Claudia Perlich, MediaSixDegrees, winner and organizer of several data mining competitions

For more information on the HPN Health Prize go to: www.heritagehealthprize.com

ABOUT HPN:

Heritage Provider Network, Inc. (HPN) is on the cutting edge of the accountable care model of health care delivery: coordinated, patient-doctor centric, integrated health care systems that represent the future of health care in the United States. HPN develops programs and services that are responsive to the healthcare needs of today's patient. HPN designs its networks to offer patients a comprehensive range of medical care in convenient locations.  It organizes and manages medical groups and independent practice associations, integrating with hospitals and ancillary care providers. This system represents a workable, successful business model that has been duplicated with medical groups, IPAs and medical facilities throughout California.  HPN is dedicated to quality, affordable health care and putting patients' wellness first. (www.heritageprovidernetwork.com)

ABOUT KAGGLE

Kaggle is a company that hosts predictive modeling competitions, allowing companies to post their problems and have the best in the world compete to offer the best solution. Kaggle has already used competitions to help improve the state of the art in HIV research, and motorway travel time forecasting.

Data science competitions are becoming exciting, as companies and researchers are realizing that they are the only way to really get the most out of a dataset. Participants are finding that they can use competitions to further their knowledge and skills, test their ideas, meet the most inspiring people and develop a reputation as a world-leading performer. Kaggle is bringing these two groups together, providing new opportunities in data science. (www.kaggle.com)

SOURCE Heritage Provider Network, Inc.