Case Study: Heritage Health Prize achieves advances in predictive hospitalization models for preventative medicine with Kaggle

The Heritage Health Prize Bringing Data Science to Preventative Medicine

Heritage Provider Network (HPN) launched the Heritage Health Prize on Kaggle to tackle the high cost of avoidable hospitalizations—more than 71 million hospital stays and roughly $30 billion in yearly avoidable costs in the U.S. The challenge asked data scientists to use anonymized claims and provider data to predict how many days each patient would spend in the hospital over the next year, with the goal of enabling earlier, preventative care.

Run from 2011–2013, the competition drew 1,660 participants (1,353 teams) who submitted 25,316 models and shared $730,000 in prizes; a $3M grand prize went unclaimed because the anonymization needed to protect patient privacy limited achievable accuracy. Even so, the contest produced many novel approaches, produced a peer-reviewed anonymization methodology, and positioned HPN as a thought leader by demonstrating what predictive health analytics can accomplish and by advancing research in preventative medicine.

Heritage Health Prize