Kickoff event in
Welcome to the 2024 MDplus Datathon! The 3rd annual MD+ datathon is a national month-long event hosted by MD+ and sponsors to foster innovative thinking about complex healthcare problems and their data-driven solutions.
You will work together with other medical students, graduate students, and trainees from all levels to generate insights and engineer solutions from clinical datasets. In contrast to prior years, this year's datathon will be divided into 3 separate competition tracks, each using a different publicly available dataset:
The specific datasets for each track will be announced after team formation. Datasets will be made available on HuggingFace.
Note that for the purposes of the Datathon, you may only use open-source models with 8-billion parameters or less if you're using an LLM as a part of your project. This restriction does not apply to tools used during development of the project. In other words, the final product of your datathon submission is subject to this restriction, but how you get there is up to you!
The 2024 MDplus Datathon runs from Wednesday, October 23, 2024 at 6 pm EST to Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at 11:59 pm AOE. Participating teams will use quantitative analyses (e.g. visualization, statistics, and other computational tools) to form clinical insights and contextualize them into actionable proposals for relevant stakeholders. As part of the datathon, participants will be invited to attend (optional) workshops and private events with sponsors (i.e., Python/R bootcamps, oral presentation workshops, fireside chats, etc.).
Final projects and presentations will be reviewed by a panel of expert judges, and the top 8 projects will be invited to a live pitch competition on Monday, November 18, 2024 at 5:30 PM EST. Live pitches are capped at 10 minutes per presentation followed by 2 min of Q&A. At the end of the live pitch competition, winners will be announced after a 30 minutes private deliberation period between the judges. The entirety of the live pitch competition will last approximately 150 minutes.
Signups will run from Tuesday, October 8, 2024 to Friday, October 18, 2024 at 11:59 pm AOE.
Please fill out the Google Form below if interested! (also linked here)
Written Tutorial | Example Code
Written Tutorial | Example Code
To be updated soon!
To be announced shortly!
Absolutely! Learning the computational tools is half the fun of the event. Participants will have access to tutorials walking through the basics of Python and R, and also how to go about analyzing the dataset. Datathon submissions are also judged on more than just technical complexity. In fact, datathon judges care more about the insights derived and the data analysis than the computational novelty or complexity of the project!
Students will be provided a dataset (e.g., claims and hospital data) and are then asked to identify an addressible problem (e.g., understanding the impact of hospital quality metrics on spending) to explore through analyzing the dataset (e.g., an observational study comparing high- vs. low- quality hospitals, an interpretable ML model predicting spending rates depending on hospital attributes and outcomes, etc.) to create an actionable recommendation (e.g., quality metrics should be indexed by spending, and efforts to deliver high quality care will result in more value-based spending habits).
Yes! We've partnered with Hugging Face 🤗 to bring you free access to powerful computational resources dedicated to the event. To get started, join our MDplus Hugging Face community here.
It's flexible and depending on your group and project!
Send us an email or DM us via Slack! The best folks to reach out are the co-directors of data science and AI, Emily Leventhal, Michael Yao (email), or Lawrence Huang. We're happy to answer any questions from signing up for the datathon to technical questions during the event.
Coming soon!