FAQs
Who can participate in the Competition?
Participating teams must be comprised of students from U.S.-based colleges and universities. The student teams will be asked to complete a participant agreement prior to being accepted as a Competition participant. Teams are encouraged to recruit students with complementary strengths to maximize their analytics capabilities including backgrounds such as computer science, data analytics, statistics, or public and clinical health.
Can I add or change team members?
Yes, you will need to submit a notification to MITRE within five days of the change through the contact email at hcfchallenge@mitre.org.
Will I be compensated for my efforts to participate in the Competition?
No.
What rights will I retain to my work?
MITRE makes no claim to ownership of your Competition entry or of Participant’s intellectual property or any third-party intellectual property contained therein. Post-competition, your algorithms and work product will be stripped of the health data and returned to you.
Will I share credit with MITRE if my idea wins?
MITRE makes no claim to ownership of your Competition entry or of Participant’s intellectual property or any third-party intellectual property contained therein.
Can MITRE alter my work without permission?
No.
Will I be restricted from publicizing my participation in the MITRE Competition?
No. MITRE encourages you to publicize your involvement.
Will MITRE publicize my participation in the MITRE Competition?
By submitting a Competition entry, Participant grants to MITRE a non-exclusive, perpetual, and irrevocable license to use Participant’s name, organization, image, the entry synopsis, and to publicly disclose the Competition scoring results.
What tools/software can I use?
Students can use any analytic tool their university provides. Students can use tools with standard algorithms embedded, but must demonstrate a justification for tool use.
What about HIPAA?
All data* provided is synthetic, created though MITRE’s open-source SyntheaTM patient generator tool. Teams and universities may keep and reuse the dataset at the close of the competition.
* All patient identities and health procedure data is fully synthetic. Provider name identities are also synthetic, but provider addresses in the data are the locations of real healthcare facilities to assist students in application of geographic analysis. No claims or care represented in this data were provided by actual healthcare providers in these locations and do not reflect the actual care practices of these entities.
What is Synthea™?
Synthea™ is an open-source, synthetic patient generator that models the medical history of synthetic patients. MITRE’s mission is to provide high-quality, synthetic, realistic but not real, patient data and associated health records covering every aspect of healthcare. The resulting data is free from cost, privacy, and security restrictions, enabling research with Health IT data that is otherwise legally or practically unavailable.