This article about the $3 million prize for an algorithm that can predict whether you will get sick is interesting, but doesn't have a lot of information. On first guess, this sounds like an attempt on behalf of insurance companies to find ways to continue charging more for the sick and the poor. I could see it used as a good engine for a preventative medicine and health improvement tool, but it doesn't sound likely that this is the case.
[Update] Upon further inspection, the company's website does say that they are not an insurance company and that they do not stand to gain financially by solving this 'problem', but I fail to see how this is a huge problem in the first place. Their website claims that there are $30 billion in unnecessary hospital visits a year, which doesn't sound accurate to me. People get symptoms, and doctors are unavailable, what do they do? Go to the hospital. This shouldn't be construed as unnecessary, as one of the main tenets of the Hippocratic oath is to ease pain. If more doctors aren't willing to make house calls or be on call 24-7, then they should expect many of their patients to go to the hospital for problems that could be easily diagnosed elsewhere. I also don't really see how this will decrease hospital visits, unless used as I described in heavily specified preventative medicine and health improvement, but I don't see this simply ending up in a 'HealthChecker' app...Seems to me like the method of use of this algorithm that the company is describing could only be used well in some setting like a website where your information was gauranteed to be private, and you could check in and track health, get tips, or check symptoms....kind of like WebMD.
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