Team Suncorp wins Analytics Datathon with plan for mental health app

Suncorp data scientists Will Bian, Adam Newfield, Darren Pook, Raj Vijayaraghavan, Wesley Wang and Kore Wong took home the $12,500 main prize at this year's Melbourne Business Analytics Datathon.

Held as part of the Melbourne Business Analytics Conference, the competition pitted teams against each other to come up with creative solutions to health challenges using government and corporate data.

Team Suncorp's winning idea showed how to target vulnerable market segments through public-private partnerships that encourage data sharing, culminating in an app to improve access to mental healthcare. 

Runners up included Team Liberty from Liberty Financial in 2nd place and EY Data from EY Data and Analytics in 3rd place. 

In the student category, the University of Melbourne team took home the $5000 main prize. 

Students Ahmad Asgharian Rezaei, Milad Chenaghlou, Li Li and Andi Partovi came up with an idea to aid in the treatment times of mental health in Victoria.

With a total prize pool of $25,000, the Datathon gave teams access to never-before-seen datasets to solve the prevailing issues of mental health for Victorians. 

To win the day, each team had to analyse major private and public sector datasets from NAB, Victorian Government, Medibank, Qantas, Roy Morgan, the Australian Institute of Health and Australian Bureau of Statistics.

"Our vision is to transform decision-making through business analytics. By partnering with the Victorian Government and world-class brands such as SAS, AWS and Data Republic to deliver a premium event for Australia's top analytics talent to solve a very real business problem, we saw the power of analytics come to life," said Mark Alexander, Executive Director of Melbourne Business School’s Centre for Business Analytics.