Identifying and improving our understanding of the risk and protective factors for severe COVID-19 illness is crucial to better protect, triage, and treat at-risk individuals. To date, researchers and medical professionals have identified several risk factors that are associated with greater risk for severe illness from COVID-19, but additional research is needed to better understand the impact these factors have on high-risk individuals. The Veteran population, in particular, has a higher prevalence of several of the known risk factors for severe COVID-19 illness. To improve our understanding of the risk and protective factors in the Veteran population, the VHA Innovation Ecosystem is utilizing the precisionFDA platform to call upon the public to develop machine learning and artificial intelligence models to predict health outcomes using synthetic Veteran health records.
If you would like to learn more about the challenge and how the VHA Innovation Ecosystem and precisionFDA are working together to improve COVID-19 patient outcomes, please visit the challenge site! Pre-registration for the challenge opens today, and the challenge submission period runs from June 1st through July 1st.
If you have any questions about the challenge, precisionFDA, or the VHA Innovation Ecosystem, please feel free to post them in this thread, and we will respond as quickly as possible.
