On June 2, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Innovation Ecosystem and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the COVID-19 Risk Factor Modeling Challenge.

Identifying and improving 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 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.

Pre-registration for the challenge is available, and the challenge submission period is open from June 2, 2020, through July 3, 2020. For more information, visit the challenge webpage. 

U.S. Food and Drug Administration