Predicting Hospital Admissions - 11Ants Analytics Excels in First Milestone of Heritage Health Prize

Some time ago I wrote about the Heritage Provider Network Health Prize . The goal of the prize is to develop a predictive algorithm that can identify patients who will be admitted to a hospital within the next year, using historical claims data. This competition is hosted by the revolutionary and cool site Kaggle.

If you can do this better than anyone else you get $3 million USD for your trouble. Nice. Though as you would expect when someone is nonchalantly handing out $3 million - you are far from the only one that benefits...according to Heritage in 2006 well over $30 Billion USD was spent on unnecessary hospital admissions. This is a prime example of deriving value out of data and refreshingly not just financial value - anybody who has spent any time in a hospital knows that it is not much fun. You will also know that the ripple from hospital admissions travel far and wide, from the patient themselves, to medical staff, to employers, to friends and family, to insurance companies, and so it goes on.

One of the few universal truths would certainly have to be the more people we can keep out of hospital the better.

The premise is that if we can identify patterns in claims data that helps to predict which patients are at risk of being admitted to hospital (a very expensive event on every metric) we can intervene, and can even afford to spend a reasonable amount of resource on such interventions to try to keep the patient out of hospital.

We at 11Ants Analytics entered this competition and to date are pretty pleased with the results. At the end of the first milestone we are placed 13th out of 971 players - which places us in the top 1.3% of contestants.

So if you are an executive at an insurance company, a health maintenance organization, a provider network, or a government health scheme, and would be interested in applying advanced predictive analytics to pulling tens of millions of dollars, to hundreds of millions of dollars out of your costs, feel free to get in touch. We would be very interested to discuss.