Funder: NIH Challenges
Due Dates: February 2, 2027, 5:00 PM Eastern (Registration) | March 26, 2027, 5:00 PM Eastern (Phase 1) | September 2027 (Phase 2)
Funding Amounts: Up to $6,000,000 total; Phase 1 prizes of $50,000; Phase 2 prizes up to $1,000,000
Summary: A two-phase prize competition validating clinical data analytic methods for reproducibility, transportability, and stability across health systems.
Key Information: Methods must support reproducible execution within the secure N3C enclave without external dependencies or site-specific modification.
Description
NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) leads this national prize competition to establish validated benchmarks for analytic methods using real-world clinical data. Eligible approaches include predictive models, causal inference methods, phenotyping algorithms, survival models, risk scores, and other clinically meaningful analytic workflows. Cancer, kidney disease, and pediatrics are priorities, but other use cases are welcome.
The competition uses the National Clinical Cohort Collaborative (N3C) secure enclave to evaluate methods across independent health systems. Phase 1 assesses methodological readiness; Phase 2 tests performance across individual sites and progressively pooled datasets. The goal is to define Good Algorithmic Practice: measurable expectations for reliable performance despite differences in populations, workflows, and data capture. Validated transportability and stability—not peak performance in one dataset—are central priorities.
