Google to Offer $25,000 Prize in Connected Patient Challenge

Medstro, the social network for healthcare professionals, announced today that Google will be offering $25,000 in Google Cloud Platform credits to the winner of the Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge, which has been running on Medstro since October. This is in addition to the $25,000 prize already offered by Boston Scientific, the primary sponsor of the challenge. The challenge is accepting submissions until January 8, 2016.

Google Cloud Platform and Google Genomics offer bioscience researchers a powerful cloud-based platform that not only stores huge amounts of data but also provides clinical trial management tools and high-performance big data analytics tools in the cloud. Just this year, Google Cloud Platform announced several high-profile research projects have chosen to use these tools, including:

• The MSSNG Project, a collaboration between Google and Autism Speaks, is an Open Science project that is sequencing the DNA of over 10,000 families affected by autism, in order to answer the many questions we still have about the disorder. This data is available free in the cloud to researchers, and has already led to several published papers.
• The Broad Institute announced in June that it will be offering its Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) as a service on Google Cloud. The goal of this collaboration is to break down major technical barriers that increasingly hinder biomedical research by addressing the need for computing infrastructure to store and process enormous datasets, and by creating tools to analyze such data and unravel long-standing mysteries about human health.
• Northrop Grumman announced a personalized health analytics platform, using Google Cloud Platform and Google Genomics, to improve knowledge extraction from health data and facilitate personalized medicine research.

With this new prize offered by Google Cloud Platform, the entrants to the Connected Patient Challenge will be vying for up to $50,000 in total prizes.

It’s Not Too Late to Submit Your Idea

The Connected Patient Challenge is still accepting submissions until January 8, 2016. To submit your idea, go to https://medstro.com/groups/boston-scientific-connected-patient-challenge and click “Submit an Idea”.