Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Innovation Ecosystem launched the COVID-19 Risk Factor Modeling Challenge.

 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.

The challenge submission period opens on June 2 and closes on July 3. For more information and to register, visit the challenge site at https://precision.fda.gov/challenges/11.