The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched the 2026 KidneyX Empower Prize Challenge, a $4 million competition to accelerate patient-centered innovations improving care coordination and transplantation outcomes. With nearly 100,000 Americans on the kidney transplant waitlist, HHS said the prize prioritizes transplants over long-term dialysis to reduce Medicare’s fiscal burden and advance data interoperability to enhance donor and recipient care. The challenge seeks solutions that bridge clinical, patient-reported and administrative data across electronic health records and transplant registries.
The competition invites AI approaches, including predictive analytics, machine learning for donor–recipient matching and risk stratification, natural language processing to normalize clinical notes, and federated learning to enable multisite model training while protecting privacy. Organizers and entrants must validate clinical performance, address regulatory and bias risks, and design interoperable workflows for deployment in transplant programs to turn innovations into measurable improvements in access and outcomes.
