Deadline: 01-Feb-2026
The Johns Hopkins University has launched its Healthcare Design Competition for student-led teams from around the world to showcase their creative solutions for improving healthcare.
A competition to celebrate good design in healthcare! Winners show a solid understanding of the need, the people impacted, focused problem-solving, and a great real-world solution!
The competition features three distinct tracks—Solutions for Advanced Health Systems, Global Health/Humanitarian Design, and Healthcare Apps/Digital Health. Each track will honor three winning teams, with prizes of $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place, and $1,000 for third place.
Open to any student-led team that has designed a health-related solution. All countries. All academic fields. Eligibility is limited to projects focused on healthcare applications within the listed tracks that began after January 1, 2024.
Each project must be driven by full-time students pursuing undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, or professional degrees such as MBA or MD, and should include more than one student per team. Postdoctoral research projects and those led by startups, faculty, or teams with significant funding exceeding $100,000 are not eligible. Teams may submit multiple unique projects.
The two-page Design Brief serves as the foundation of the submission and will be assessed using a simplified rubric comprising four equally weighted criteria: problem description, solution concept(s), reduction to practice, and pathway to implementation.
The brief should clearly define the healthcare challenge, detail the proposed solution and its design rationale, describe proof-of-concept results or prototypes, and outline the future steps for implementation.
The format requirements specify that the brief must be two pages including figures, using an 11-point or larger font in Arial, Helvetica, Palatino Linotype, or Georgia. Margins should be at least half an inch on all sides, and the layout must not exceed six lines per inch or 15 characters per inch. Figures and photos are encouraged and count towards the page limit, while references may be added on a separate page.
Participants must submit a two-page design brief by February 1, 2026. Finalists will be announced on March 16, 2026, and the live competition and awards ceremony will be held on April 11, 2026, from 10 am to 2 pm EST.
For more information, visit Johns Hopkins University.
