IHPI members on prizewinning team in NEJM SPRINT Data Challenge

Three IHPI members and a U-M graduate student are part of the team that claimed third prize in the New England Journal of Medicine's SPRINT Data Challenge, which allowed teams from around the world to compete to create new knowledge and tools from the raw data of a major clinical trial for hypertension. 

The team, led by Stanford University researcher Sanjay Basu, M.D., Ph.D., included IHPI members Brian Denton, Ph.D., Rodney Hayward, M.D., and Jeremy Sussman, M.D., M.Sc.,  as well as U-M engineering doctoral student Lauren Steimle and Stanford biostatistician Joseph Rigdon, Ph.D.

They created and validated a tool for clinicians to use in making decisions about intensive blood pressure treatment. Their project beat 140 others to claim the prize, which includes a chance to present their tool at a NEJM event on April 3. The winners were determined mainly by expert  judges, but crowdvoting results -- which brought the team 128 votes -- also counted. 

All the winners of the challenge will present at NEJM's Aligning Incentives for Sharing Clinical Trial Data summit and free web event on April 3–4, 2017.  The presentations will be webcast for free at 1:45 on April 3; registration is required to view the webcast.

Full details about the third-prize entry:

Development and Validation of a Clinical Decision Score to Maximize Benefit and Minimize Harm from Intensive Blood Pressure Treatment

Intensive blood pressure treatment can reduce the chance of having a heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular illness, but it may increase the risk of a serious adverse event, such as kidney failure. We developed and validated a clinical decision score to identify patients likely to experience benefits and unlikely to experience harms when undergoing intensive treatment. The score was developed from SPRINT trial data and tested using both SPRINT and ACCORD-BP trial data. More information