A team from North Texas is joining national giants like IBM, the Mayo Clinic, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Geisinger in an inaugural federal challenge.

Lightbeam Health Solutions and DocSynk, which are both based in Irving, are participating as one team in the CMS Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge. CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services) chose 25 applicants to advance to Stage 1 of the challenge—the Lightbeam/DocSynk team was the only one from the DFW region selected. The Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services is a federal agency in the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

CMS said the challenge is a “key step in implementing President Trump’s Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” So, the CMS AI Challenge is intended to engage innovators from various sectors in developing AI-driven predictions for healthcare providers and clinicians. The solutions coming out of the challenge should aid in predicting health outcomes and keeping patients healthy.

“Artificial intelligence is a vehicle that can help drive our system to value—proven to reduce out-of-pocket costs and improve quality,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement. “It holds the potential to revolutionize healthcare: imagine a doctor being able to predict health outcomes—such as a hospital admission—and to intervene before an illness strikes. The participants in our AI Challenge demonstrate that such possibilities will soon be within reach.”

Lightbeam Health Solutions and DocSynk

This isn’t the first time Lightbeam, a provider of end-to-end population health management solutions, and DocSynk, a developer of an artificial intelligence healthcare engine, have worked together.

Lightbeam’s mission is to provide solutions that improve quality of care, and therefore quality of life. Its tech is intended to be “the guidance needed to deliver the right care at the right time,” while reducing costs and delivering outstanding financial results. The platform uses patient data from multiple sources, so providers can analyze and identify opportunities to improve. 

DocSynk calls its AI-Inside platform “the foundation of today’s AI and tomorrow’s healthcare transformation.” It uses various clinical informatics, recommender systems, and deep learning on patient data sets so it can uncover hidden patterns, trends, and similarities. It was named to CNBC’s UpStart100 list in 2018, an exclusive list of startups “breaking industry barriers.”

Back in 2017, Lightbeam integrated DocSynk’s AI tech, which incorporates machine and deep learning functionality, into its population health management platform. The intent was to reduce costs and improve quality by better identifying and targeting patient groups.

At the time, Vaidyanatha Siva, founder and CEO of DocSynk, said both organizations share the same mission. The two are still partners, with DocSynk enhancing Lightbeam’s ability to predict risk.

Siva said Lightbeam is listed as the primary applicant on the CMS site as it’s bigger than DocSynk. But, the teams are participating in the challenge together.

Siva was formerly the CTO and COO of Parkland’s Innovation arm, and was instrumental in raising $50M in funding for healthcare predictive analytics research. His daughter is following in his footsteps, too: Shruti Siva reached the semifinals stage of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge this year. 

About the CMS AI Health Outcomes Challenge

The CMS Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge was launched in March by the CMS Innovation Center, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Data science experts, healthcare data specialists, and clinical care providers evaluated the more than 300 applications, and a CMS selection panel chose the final group. From here, seven participants will be awarded $60,000 and move on to Stage 2. After the teams refine their solutions using CMS data sets, the winners will be chosen—the grand prize winner will receive $1 million and the runner-up will get $230,000.

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