The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are using a fun late-summer/early fall event — the chili cook-off — as the theme for its latest campaign against durable medical equipment (DME) fraud and abuse.
CMS introduced the Crushing Fraud Chili Cook-Off Competition on Aug. 19, describing it as “a market-based research challenge aimed at harnessing explainable artificial intelligence (AI), specifically machine learning (ML) models, to detect anomalies and trends in Medicare claims data that can be translated into novel indicators of fraud.”
Phase 1 of the fraud chili cook-off — research proposal submissions — began Aug. 19 and closes Sept. 19. Based on those submissions, 10 teams will be chosen to advance to phase 2, aka, the cook-off competition.
“Finalists will receive access to Medicare Fee-for-Service (FFS) Hospice, Part B, and DME claims data via CMS’s limited data sets,” the announcement said. “Participants will apply their proposed AI/ML techniques to the data and submit a summary of their findings, as well as proposed scalable analytic and policy solutions. CMS will select and publicly announce the challenge winner.”
Phase 2 submissions are due Dec. 1, with the chili cook-off winner announced Dec. 15.
