Two IHPI teams compete in NEJM SPRINT Data Challenge

Two teams that include IHPI members and U-M students are competing in the SPRINT Data Analysis Challenge, being run by the New England Journal of Medicine as a way of stimulating new uses of clinical trial data available in the public domain.

Voting ends Feb. 28 for the crowd-voting portion of the challenge, which lets anyone review the submissions from teams around the world and vote for their favorite.

The IHPI-member teams, and their competitors, all made it to the crowd-voting segment of the competition after making it through a panel of judges that evaluated the initial submissions and chose a subset for the Challenge Round. Each team analyzed the dataset underlying the NEJM article about the SPRINT trial, A Randomized Trial of Intensive versus Standard Blood-Pressure Control (N Engl J Med 373: 2103-2116) — and identified a novel scientific or clinical finding that advances medical science.

See the two submissions with IHPI ties here -- and sign up for a free account to be able to vote:

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

IHPI members Jeremy B Sussman, M.D., M.Sc., Brian Denton, Ph.D, and Rodney Hayward, M.D. teamed up with Lauren N. Steimle, a Ph.D. Candidate in U-M's Industrial and Operations Engineering program, and Joseph Rigdon, a biostatistician at Stanford University. They developed and validated a clinical decision score to identify patients likely to experience benefits and unlikely to experience harms when undergoing intensive treatment.

The incremental effects of antihypertensive drugs: an instrumental variable analysis of the SPRINT trial

IHPI director John Ayanian, M.D., M.P.P. and members Andrew Ryan, Ph.D., and Brahmajee Nallamothu, M.D., M.P.H. teamed with graduate student Adam Markovitz, and Jacob Mack, a U-M medical student. Their findings challenge the view that the addition of new antihypertensive drug classes will result in progressively smaller reductions in blood pressure while increasing the incidence of adverse events.

Crowdvoting counts for 10 percent of the total criteria used to determine the winners of the Challenge Round.