The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced seven finalists who will advance to the final round of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Outcomes Challenge. The multi-stage competition was launched last year, with more than 300 entities proposing AI solutions for predicting patient health outcomes for potential use by the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, according to a press release from the agency.
In this last stage of the competition, the seven finalists will further develop algorithms that demonstrate how AI tools can be used to predict unplanned hospital and skilled nursing facility admissions and adverse events and also will develop predictive algorithms for a standard target to be selected by CMS. CMS will announce the grand prize winner (who will receive up to $1 million in prize money) and runner-up (who will receive up to $230,000 in prize money) by the end of April 2021.
The Finalists are:
· Ann Arbor Algorithms (Sterling Heights, MI)
· ClosedLoop.ai (Austin, TX)
· Deloitte Consulting, LLP (Arlington, VA)
· Geisinger (Danville, PA)
· Jefferson Health (Philadelphia, PA)
· Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (Princeton, NJ)
· University of Virginia Health System (Charlottesville, VA)
The CMS AI Challenge attracted innovators from all sectors – not just from healthcare – to harness AI solutions to predict health outcomes. To select the seven finalists, CMS conducted a review that included checking compliance with application requirements and an assessment by AI experts. The submission parameters and evaluation process were designed with input from these AI experts. Submissions aimed to forecast a variety of outcomes, including unplanned admissions related to heart failure, pneumonia, COPD, and various other high-risk conditions; and adverse events such as hospital-acquired infections, sepsis, and respiratory failure. In Stage 2, finalists will also be required to address implicit algorithmic biases that impact health disparities in their submissions.
CMS evaluated each submission based on the model’s performance – specifically, accuracy and how well innovators visually demonstrated how clinicians could use their model forecasts to improve patient care and outcomes. Clinicians from the American Academy of Family Physicians, a CMS partner in the AI Challenge, reviewed and evaluated the visual displays. A panel of CMS senior leadership reviewed the assessments of the expert evaluation panel, and selected the seven finalists, who will each receive $60,000 in prize money and have the opportunity to compete for the grand prize and runner-up awards.
The CMS AI Health Outcomes Challenge was launched in March 2019 by the CMS Innovation Center in collaboration with the American Academy of Family Physicians and Arnold Ventures.
