Just a reminder, the $3 million Heritage Health Prize competition will kick off on April 4. Sponsored by the Heritage Provider Network in Southern and Central California, the competition is meant to promote innovation in predictive modeling and clinical decision support, with the goal of helping physicians develop care plans to keep high-risk patients healthy and out of the hospital.

In a story I wrote for Inside Healthcare IT (formerly Inside Healthcare Computing) in January, I explained that HPN will provide contestants with three years worth of de-identified claims data on 100,000 patients, from which they are expected to develop algorithms to identify high-risk patients. “We’re looking for an algorithm to allow us to predict, based on a person’s history, the likelihood of a person’s hospitalization over the next year,” HPN legal counsel and executive Jonathan Gluck told me.