ICES teams win first place, runner-up in Canada Health Infoway Data Impact Challenge

The Canada Health Infoway Data Impact Challenge, one in a series of ImagineNation Challenges, challenged researchers and data analysts to answer healthcare questions hiding in existing data with a goal to “help reimagine the future of evidence-informed decision making.”

Canada Health Infoway put the call out to researchers across Canada who are interested in tackling challenging health policy and healthcare questions. Teams required authorized access to Canadian healthcare data sets and the ability to conduct timely, privacy-sensitive analysis. They had a choice of six questions, with 64 days to submit answers, with a speed incentive. Forty-one entries were submitted, nine of them from ICES.

The $20,000 First Place Award went to a team from ICES Western, Team Western π-rates (Kuan Liu, Ahmed Al-Jaishi, Eric McArthur, Michael Ordon, Arsh Jain, Blayne Welk). Another ICES team, Team Avengers (Simon Hollands, Ryan Ng, Deva Thiruchelvam, Jagadish Rangrej, Marian Vermeulen, Tony Antoniou) won a $10,000 Runner-Up Award. Both teams answered the question, “What is the rate of repeated diagnostic imaging tests within a ninety (90) day period?”

All the Data Impact Challenge submissions have been published on the ImagineNation website.