Stanford Medicine has been named the winner of the 2023 Hearst Health Prize for its artificial intelligence (AI) solution that helps identify patients at risk for heart attack.
The purpose of the Hearst Health Prize is to proliferate best practices in data science in healthcare more rapidly, and to showcase successful work. The competition evaluates data science projects or programs that have been implemented and have demonstrated improved health outcomes. It is not a grant program. The winner of the Hearst Health Prize receives $100,000. As the official partner of the Hearst Health Prize, the UCLA Center for SMART Health identifies data science programs making a measurable difference in human health.
The award for excellence in data science in healthcare was presented by Gregory Dorn, M.D., M.P.H., president of Hearst Health; Arash Naeim, M.D., Ph.D., co-director of UCLA Center for SMART Health; and Alex Bui, Ph.D., co-director of the UCLA Center for SMART Health, during UCLA Health Data Day.
"All of us on the Stanford Medicine team share a vision for designing more advanced systems to deliver potentially life-saving interventions to patients," said Alexander Sandhu, M.D., M.S., the Stanford Medicine project lead, in a statement. "As a physician, it is tremendously gratifying to see the powerful role data science can play in improving clinical care."
Stanford's Incidental Coronary Calcium team aimed to use the detection of coronary artery calcium from computed tomography (CT) of the chest to improve the primary prevention of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Coronary artery calcium—an established predictor of heart attack and stroke—can be identified on chest CTs. About 15 million chest CTs are performed for various reasons in the United States each year, while chest CTs specifically to detect coronary artery calcium are conducted only about 60,000 times per year.
The Stanford team developed an AI algorithm that searches existing chest CTs in the patient record to identify calcium deposits and present this information to primary care physicians. A multi-center study of the program showed that across the patients identified by Stanford's algorithm, the following results were achieved compared with usual care:
- Statin therapy: 51.2 percent received a statin prescription versus 6.9 percent with usual care (p<0.001)
- Shared decision making: 77.9 percent had a statin discussion or prescription compared with 12.0 percent with usual care (p<0.001)
- LDL cholesterol reduction: 97.2 mg/dL versus 115.3 mg/dL with usual care (p=0.005)
"The Stanford Medicine program demonstrates what a powerful resource AI can be for clinicians as they care for patients," said Dorn, in a statement. "Our hope is that others will be inspired to design data science solutions that support clinicians to make a meaningful impact on health outcomes."
The Hearst Health network includes FDB (First Databank), Zynx Health, MCG, Homecare Homebase and MHK. Hearst also holds a minority interest in the precision medicine and oncology analytics company M2GEN.
The UCLA Center for Systematic, Measurable, Actionable, Resilient, and Technology-driven (SMART) Health is a campus-wide collaborative that looks to the integrated transformation of healthcare through emergent data and technologies. A joint effort between the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), the Institute for Precision Health (IPH), and the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences that brings together UCLA's experts to shape how digital and data-driven healthcare technologies will help to manage risk, reliability, resilience, uncertainty, and precision in future biomedical research and clinical care.
