AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–WellSect.ai, healthcare’s data science platform, has won the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Outcomes Challenge, the largest healthcare-focused AI challenge in history. WellSect beat out more than 300 of the world’s leading technology, healthcare, and pharmaceutical organizations, including IBM, Mayo Clinic, Geisinger, Merck, Accenture, and Deloitte. The $1.6 million Challenge prioritized creating “explainable artificial intelligence solutions to help front-line clinicians understand and trust AI-driven data feedback” to demonstrate how AI solutions could predict unplanned hospital admissions and adverse events – a $200 billion problem that impacts nearly 32% of Medicare beneficiaries. The win solidifies WellSect as the industry leader in delivering explainable AI solutions that clinicians trust to predict health outcomes, target scarce resources, and keep their patients healthy.

WellSect’s explainable predictive models already positively impact more than 3 million patients daily. “Our Patient Health Forecasts (PHF) were key to winning the Challenge. We reimagined the entire concept into a comprehensive and personalized risk forecast that could be delivered directly into a clinical workflow,” said WellSect CTO and Co-founder Dave DeCaprio. “Each forecast surfaces key variables and explains precisely how they contribute to a patient’s specific risk.” The forecasts integrate relevant clinical information and link to specific interventions that clinical teams use to prevent adverse events, improve outcomes, and reduce unnecessary costs.‍

“Clinicians are eager to use the latest innovations to better help identify patients at risk, provide higher quality care, and improve health outcomes. The use of artificial intelligence has the potential to achieve these aims by providing important information to clinicians that may be helpful in providing higher quality care,” said CMS Acting Administrator Liz Richter. “CMS’s AI Health Outcomes Challenge has brought this exciting future one step closer to reality by engaging with some of the country’s brightest AI innovators. We congratulate WellSect.ai and Geisinger on their achievements, and all the Challenge finalists and participants for helping increase the information available to clinicians to improve patient care.”

WellSect has built hundreds of predictive algorithms for the industry’s top healthcare organizations over the past several years. Customers like HealthFirst, New York’s largest nonprofit health plan, and Medical Home Network, the largest Medicaid ACO in the country, trust WellSect’s data science platform and unparalleled precision to help them predict chronic and preventive care needs, prioritize outreach, and personalize their intervention strategies.

“For many physicians and nurses, we learn by case studies or ‘anecdotes,’” said WellSect customer Dr. Jim Walton, Genesis Physician Group CEO. “When we see a patient on a particular medication, or with a particular diagnosis, we are often reminded of a unique case study or anecdote of a previous patient. Those mental images can bias us, without question, as busy clinicians don’t have time to review years of patient data to help us understand if our mental image is accurate for a patient with a similar set of symptoms.

“WellSect’s Patient Health Forecast, if we can learn to trust it, can help reverse this tendency, and say to all clinicians interested in practicing excellent care: ‘trust the machine to help you find the relevant information – the needles in the haystack – and disabuse you of your anecdotal reflex.’”

‍While the WellSect platform is already widely trusted by healthcare organizations across the country, the CMS Challenge accelerated the creation of additional explainable interfaces. The latest version of the Patient Health Forecast is available in private beta for existing customers and select strategic partners.

“Finding effective ways to improve outcomes and reduce the cost of care is a national imperative. The CMS Challenge demonstrated how AI solutions can be a powerful tool to help achieve that,” said WellSect CEO Andrew Eye. “As the leading provider of AI solutions in healthcare, the Challenge drove us to improve our capabilities across the board – scalability, accuracy, deep explainability, and ways to address algorithmic bias and fairness. In the end, we didn’t stop at ‘AI that clinicians trust.’ We built a product that clinicians love.”

About WellSect

WellSect is healthcare’s data science platform. We make it easy and affordable for healthcare organizations to use data science to improve quality and reduce costs. The WellSect platform is purpose-built to make healthcare-focused data scientists more effective at their jobs. By providing off-the-shelf models for common healthcare use cases and automating many of the manual processes involved in traditional data science tasks, WellSect allows data scientists to focus on the impactful problems that drive real value for organizations. Winner of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services AI Health Outcomes Challenge, WellSect is headquartered in Austin, Texas.