CMS launches Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)announced a new competition that aims to accelerate innovative solutions tobetter predict health outcomes and improve the quality of care for patients.Following President Trump’s executive order to prioritize research anddevelopment of America’s artificial intelligence capabilities, the CMSArtificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge will unleash innovativesolutions as CMS continues to move the healthcare system towards value.

“The Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge is anopportunity for innovators to demonstrate how artificial intelligence tools –such as deep learning and neural networks – can be used to predict unplanned hospitaland skilled nursing facility admissions and adverse events,” said CMSAdministrator, Seema Verma. “For artificial intelligence to be successful inhealthcare, it must not only enhance the predictive ability of illnesses anddiseases, but also enable providers to focus more time with patients. The powerof artificial intelligence will truly be unleashed when providers understandand trust the data and predictions.”

Partnering with the American Academy of Family Physiciansand the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the challenge will engage withinnovators from all sectors – not just from healthcare – to harness artificialintelligence solutions to predict health outcomes. It aims to developartificial intelligence-driven predictions that healthcare providers andclinicians participating in CMS Innovation Center models could use to reducethe burden to perform quality improvement activities and make quality measuresmore impactful.

The challenge is a three-stage competition that will beginwith the Launch Stage, in which participants will submit an application. Up to20 participants will be selected to participate in Stage 1 of the Challenge. Moreinformation about Stage 1 and Stage 2 will be announced later this year.

CMS and the partnering organizations will award up to $1.65-millionin total to selected participants in Stage 1 and Stage 2. Prize amounts aresubject to change. If selected for Stage 1, participants will developalgorithms that predict health outcomes from Medicare fee-for-service data, andstrategies and methodologies to explain the artificial intelligence-drivenpredictions to frontline clinicians and physicians while building trust in thedata. Participants in Stages 1 and 2 of the competition will use Medicareclaims data sets provided by CMS to develop their algorithms and solutions.

The deadline for submitting applications for the LaunchStage is June 18, 2019.