May 1, 2021
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that ClosedLoop.ai was selected the winner and Geisinger the runner-up in the agency’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Outcomes Challenge. This multi-stage competition, operated by CMS’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMS Innovation Center) in collaboration with the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and Arnold Ventures, began in 2019 with the aim of accelerating development of AI solutions for predicting patient health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries for potential use by the Innovation Center. The competition has significantly broadened the Innovation Center’s knowledge of AI and its potential applications, which will help the CMS Innovation Center better design and implement future models as part of its mission to test innovative payment and service delivery models.
Out of more than 300 initial entries, ClosedLoop.ai was chosen as the grand prize winner and will receive up to $1 million in prize money. Based in Austin, Texas, the company is a leader in developing healthcare data science solutions. Challenge Runner-Up Geisinger, a non-profit healthcare system based in Danville, Pennsylvania, will receive up to $230,000 in prize money.
ClosedLoop.ai and Geisinger were among the seven finalists chosen in October 2020 to take part in the final stage of the competition. In this last stage, the participants further refined the solutions that they developed in the prior stage to help predict unplanned hospital and skilled nursing facility admissions and adverse events, and additionally developed predictive algorithms to identify beneficiaries at risk of mortality in 12 months. The finalists worked to address sources of bias in their solutions that could have the potential to affect health disparities in their submissions. The finalists also demonstrated how their solutions would easily explain the predictions to clinicians.
More information on the CMS AI Health Outcomes Challenge is available at: https://innovation.cms.gov/innovation-models/artificial-intelligence-health-outcomes-challenge.