Thrive Earlier Detection has won the BlueCross BlueShield Data Innovation Challenge, the contest's sponsors, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and Blue Health Intelligence, announced Tuesday.

WHY IT MATTERS
Thrive Earlier Detection's mission is to develop tools designed to integrate earlier cancer detection into routine medical care. Its CancerSEEK technology is a liquid biopsy test to help find many cancers at earlier stages of disease; it's designed to be administered to healthy adults during routine medical care.

Thrive was chosen from more than 130 submissions and five finalists in the BCBS Data Innovation Challenge. It aims to evaluate the health and economic impact of earlier multi-cancer detection, and better identify and predict populations that will most likely benefit from this approach.

The company will now gain six months' worth of access to a select deidentified dataset drawn from 5 billion covered procedures performed annually, originating from more than 170 million BCBS members and provided by Blue Health Intelligence, an analytics-focused independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.

THE LARGER TREND
BlueCross BlueShield Data Innovation Challenge was launched this past spring by BCBSA and BHI, in collaboration with HIMSS and Healthbox. (Healthbox, like Healthcare IT News, is owned by HIMSS.)

In September, BCBS announced the contest's five finalists, which in addition to Thrive included Livongo, Pager, Wildflower Health and Workit Health.

The five organizations were given two months to test their hypotheses using a limited HIPAA-compliant-dataset. In November, they presented their findings to the challenge's selection committee, which chose Thrive as the contest's winner.

ON THE RECORD
"It is a tremendous honor to win this challenge, which represents a significant opportunity to confirm that earlier detection of cancer can reduce costs and more importantly, increase survival," said David J. Daly, CEO of Thrive Earlier Detection.

"The cancer care gap is enormous – with more than 1.7 million new cancer cases and 600,000 deaths due to cancer in 2019 alone, our team is passionate in our mission to reverse these tragically high numbers of cancer deaths," said Daly. "We look forward to this partnership, and the ways that it will help us realize our goal of saving lives by making earlier detection of cancer a part of routine medical care."

"We're excited to continue working with Thrive as they dive even further into BHI's immense store of longitudinal and historical healthcare data," added Swati Abbott, CEO of BHI. "By providing a complete view into a population's healthcare journey, our partnership offers the chance to bring greater innovation to cancer care for all Americans."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
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