Heritage Provider Network (HPN) presented a $500,000 award to the winning team, POWERDOT, for the Heritage Health Prize competition powered by the Kaggle machine learning challenge platform. The competition ran from April 4, 2011 until April 4, 2013. Rumor has it that given the sizable prize money awards, some large East Coast financial services companies hired data scientists to work exclusively on the competition. None of those participants won however. HPN made the announcement at the Health Datapalooza Forum in Washington DC in June 2013. The video below is the presentation ceremony featuring the POWERDOT team members.
If you are a data scientist, it is highly recommended that you download and review the papers submitted by the winners of each of the 3 project milestones (2 each, so 6 papers). You can learn a lot about leading-edge machine learning techniques by following along with the various solutions.