Code-a-thon on rheumatoid arthritis includes $40,000 in prizes

This year’s Health Datapalooza includes a code-a-thon using non-governmental de-identified administrative claims data and electronic record clinical data to establish algorithms to predict clinical response to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) management.

Optum, Academy Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services will sponsor the challenge.

Participants will be provided access to a secured development environment in a staged competition over three weeks to create the best competitive algorithms to gauge clinical response. Teams will be competing for $40,000 in prizes with the winners announced at the 7th Health Datapalooza on May 10. Fifteen teams will be selected for the competition.

Lack of persistence and compliance to therapy can result in resurgence of symptoms, other complicating factors and lower quality of life, according to information on the website. The algorithm should be designed so that it can be meaningfully deployed across the spectrum of stakeholders to support the implementation of a program to impact adherence.

“Simply put, the resulting algorithm should not only provide high predictive accuracy but also be constructed in a way that the results could be easily communicated to providers, payers, pharmacists and life science companies so that the algorithm can be used to unify the stakeholders in implementing programs to impact medication adherence,” read the challenge announcement

Between 1.3 and 1.5 million people in the United States have RA and a recent study from GBI research estimates the population will grow to nearly 1.7 million by 2020. GBI’s research also estimates the U.S. treatment market for RA can be expected to increase in value from $6.4 billion in 2013 to $9.3 billion by 2020.