Win Up to $5,000 for Student Health Design Projects: Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition 2026

If you and your classmates have sketched a user-friendly ventilator adapter on a napkin, prototyped a community health app in a dorm room, or designed a low-cost clinic workflow that actually makes sense, this competition is made for you. The Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition 2026 awards cash prizes across three tracks—Advanced Health Systems, Global Health/Humanitarian Design, and Healthcare Apps/Digital Health—with first-place winners taking home $5,000. That’s not venture capital, but it’s enough to pay for a refined prototype, pilot testing, or a focused trip to meet partners where the work happens.

Short, sharp, and focused: the competition prizes projects that show a clear understanding of the problem, thoughtful design decisions, and tangible moves toward real-world impact. It’s student-only, fast-moving, and merciless about clarity. If your team can tell the story of the problem and the solution in two pages—and back it up with pictures or prototype results—you’ve got a shot.

Below I’ll walk you through what the competition actually pays attention to, who should and should not waste a weekend on this, how to craft a two-page design brief that reads like a mini-success case, and a practical timeline that gets you to submission well before the 11:59 PM EST deadline on February 1, 2026.

At a Glance

Why This Competition Matters

Student competitions can be performative fluff—or they can be exactly the nudge a project needs to go from prototype to pilot. Johns Hopkins’ contest sits firmly in the latter category when you treat it right. The dollar amounts are meaningful but modest; the real prize is external validation from a respected institution and feedback that can sharpen your next funder pitch.

Winning (or even placing) signals you can describe a clinical or system problem crisply, propose a plausible and usable fix, and show you’ve moved beyond ideation. For student teams, that validation helps with grad-school applications, fellowship nominations, institutional support, and seed funding conversations. Judges here are medtech engineers and designers; they want to see rigor, not buzzwords.

The three tracks let you choose the framing that best fits your work. If your solution plugs into a tertiary hospital workflow, consider Advanced Health Systems. If you’re working on low-cost diagnostics, sanitation, or community-delivered care in a resource-limited setting, the Global Health track is likely your home. If you built an app, dashboard, or connected-device interface, aim for Healthcare Apps/Digital Health.

What This Opportunity Offers

Beyond the cash, the competition offers a concentrated deadline that forces clarity. The two-page design brief requirement is brutal in the best possible way: you must distill the problem, the solution concept, early evidence, and an implementation roadmap into readable, prioritized content. That discipline will serve you in any grant, pitch, or policy brief.

Prizes per track (1st, 2nd, 3rd) reward multiple teams, so there’s a reasonable chance that a polished but not-yet-funded project will be recognized. The judging criteria split evenly across four areas—problem description, solution concept, reduction to practice, and pathway to implementation—so no single flashy demo can carry you. You need narrative, evidence, and feasibility.

The competition also gives you a chance to practice translating clinical pain points into design requirements. Judges expect clarity for an audience of medtech engineers and designers who may be unfamiliar with niche clinical contexts. That’s a crucial skill: if your brief convinces an engineer that your clinical workflow problem is real and your solution is sensible, you’ve already done half the work toward adoption.

Finally, the competition is global in scope and has a track for humanitarian work—so projects addressing healthcare challenges in Africa or other under-resourced regions align well with the Global Health category. Use that to your advantage by showing context, partnerships, and pathways to local adoption.

Who Should Apply

This is a student competition, and it’s strict about that. Teams must be driven by full-time students enrolled in undergraduate, masters, doctoral, or professional programs (MBA, MD, etc.). Postdocs, faculty-led projects, or startup companies cannot compete. The intent is to reward student ingenuity and leadership.

If you started your project after January 1, 2024, you’re eligible. That excludes older, mature projects or ones that have had substantial outside investment—specifically, projects that have consumed more than $100,000 in funding are out. That rule keeps the contest focused on early-stage, student-driven innovation.

Examples of ideal applicants:

• A multi-disciplinary student team that prototyped a simplified oxygen delivery adapter for low-resource hospitals in 2024 and ran bench testing.
• A pair of students who built an Android app to triage community health workers and piloted it in two clinics with user feedback collected.
• A group that designed a low-cost, locally manufacturable wound dressing and has photos or renderings plus initial lab results.

Who should not apply:

• Solo student projects. The rules require teams with more than one full-time student.
• Projects already funded beyond $100K or managed by startup entities.
• Postdoctoral research projects or faculty research that students are assisting on.

If your project is student-led but involves an industry partner, you can still apply—just show that students are leading design and decision-making, and disclose funding sources that don’t push you over the $100K threshold.

Insider Tips for a Winning Application

1. Tell a tight story. The judges read for clarity. Open with a single-sentence problem statement that names who is affected, where, and why current care fails. Think of the first line as your elevator pitch—if it doesn’t make someone care, the rest won’t either.

2. Divide the two pages by the judging criteria. Allocate roughly one half-page to Problem Description, one half-page to Solution Concept, half a page to Reduction to Practice (proof of concept), and half a page to Pathway to Implementation. That maps directly to scoring and prevents you from over-indexing on background.

3. Use visuals that do the heavy lifting. One well-labeled figure or sequence of photos can communicate user flow, device components, or prototype stages faster than paragraphs. But don’t jam in huge images that are unreadable at print size; make labels legible and annotate key details.

4. Show realistic next steps. Judges want to see you understand the hurdles—regulatory, manufacturing, training, cost—and have a plausible plan to get from prototype to deployment. Don’t promise market domination; promise pilot studies, partnerships, or a phased testing plan.

5. Center the user. Human-centered design isn’t a buzzword here; it’s a measurable practice. Include user quotes, observed behaviors, or metrics from small pilots that show you engaged with the people who will use your solution.

6. Demonstrate technical competency without jargon. You’re writing for medtech engineers and designers but not for your lab PI. Briefly state methods used (bench test type, sample size, pilot duration) and what they showed. If you used software, list key frameworks or platforms; if hardware, note materials and manufacturing approach.

7. Edit with ruthless economy. Two pages is short. Get colleagues who don’t work in healthcare to read it—if they understand, judges will too. Trim passive language, remove tangents, and ensure every sentence has a purpose.

8. Prepare a references page. Because references don’t count toward the two-page limit, use that extra space to cite essential literature, prior devices, or standards that justify your choices. Keep citations compact and relevant.

9. Submit early and test the PDF. Convert your brief to PDF and check that fonts, margins, and image quality survive the conversion. The rules require specific font sizes and page margins—follow them to the letter.

10. Use the competition as a learning tool. Even if you don’t win, the brief and any feedback you receive can fuel grant proposals, accelerator applications, or institutional support requests.

Application Timeline (Work Backward from Deadline)

Deadline: February 1, 2026, 11:59 PM EST. Treat that as the absolute cutoff and plan to submit at least 48 hours earlier.

• Mid–January: Finalize visuals and get engineering/clinical co-authors to sign off. Lock the design brief.
• Early–January: Circulate a complete draft to at least three reviewers—one peer, one clinician/subject-matter expert, and one non-specialist. Incorporate feedback.
• December: Run or finalize the reduction-to-practice elements: photos, test data, user feedback. Start assembling the references page.
• November–December: Draft your pathway to implementation and budget expectations (even if high-level). Reach out to potential mentors who could advise or endorse the project.
• October: Decide track and confirm eligibility (project start date after Jan 1, 2024; team composition). Gather team bios and institutional affiliations.
• September–October: Sketch initial brief, decide figures, and map content to the rubric. Begin basic prototyping or pilot activities if needed.

This schedule assumes your project already exists in some form. If you’re starting from scratch in December, you’ll need to compress aggressively, which lowers your odds. Start early.

Required Materials and How to Prepare Them

The core required material is the two-page Design Brief (including figures). References may be a separate page. The application form will also ask for team member details and project metadata.

Design Brief specifics:

• Two pages max, including figures. No information in margins.
• Acceptable fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Palatino Linotype, or Georgia at 11 pt or larger.
• Type density limit and line density rules are enforced; follow them to avoid formatting violations.
• Figures count toward page limit—use them, but carefully.
• References on a separate page do not count toward two-page limit.

Other likely requirements from the form:

• Team roster with roles and institutional affiliations.
• Short project abstract or one-sentence project title.
• Project start date (must be after Jan 1, 2024).
• Confirmation of funding history (declare whether >$100K has been used).
• Contact details for the primary student lead.

Preparation advice:

• Draft narrative text in a word processor that respects your chosen font and margins, then produce the PDF from that file.
• Keep figures as vector images or high-resolution PNGs; verify readability at 100% zoom.
• Prepare a short team bios paragraph (1–2 sentences each) to paste into the form.
• Save multiple PDF versions and test them on different machines to ensure fonts embed correctly.

What Makes an Application Stand Out

Clarity wins. Judges are balancing clinical validity, engineering design, and realism. The single most frequent reason excellent ideas don’t place is that the application fails to show a credible path from prototype to use.

High-scoring applications do several things well:

• They identify a specific user and setting (e.g., midwife in a rural clinic, OR nurse in a tertiary hospital) and explain current pain points with brief evidence.
• They present a solution with design rationale tied to user needs—why this form factor, why this workflow, why these materials?
• They provide tangible reduction-to-practice evidence: photos, bench testing results, pilot user feedback, or simulated workflows.
• They show an explicit pathway to implementation with named partners, regulatory considerations, cost estimates, or staged pilots.
• They are formatted for readability: headings that map to the rubric, concise figure captions, and a references page that backs claims.

Projects that situate their work within realistic constraints—local manufacturing options, training requirements, supply-chain considerations—stand out versus solutions that ignore context. For Global Health submissions, that means demonstrating local engagement and sustainability thinking. For digital health, it means privacy, interoperability, and user onboarding are addressed.

Common Mistakes to Avoid (and How to Fix Them)

Mistake: Vague problem statements. Fix: Name the who, where, and why in one crisp sentence. Use quantifiable evidence where possible (e.g., “30% of clinic patients miss follow-up because of…”).

Mistake: Too much jargon. Fix: Assume the judge is an intelligent engineer who hasn’t worked in your niche. Replace discipline-specific acronyms with short explanations.

Mistake: Overambitious scope. Fix: Scale back to a realistic pilot. Propose a phased approach with clear deliverables for the next 6–12 months.

Mistake: Poorly formatted figures or illegible text. Fix: Make every figure legible at print size. Use arrows and short annotations rather than long captions.

Mistake: Missing the eligibility rules. Fix: Double-check team composition, start date, and prior funding. If in doubt, disqualify yourself voluntarily rather than wasting time.

Mistake: Ignoring the reduction-to-practice requirement. Fix: Even simple bench tests, user surveys, or photos of a prototype can demonstrate progress. Spend time documenting and presenting that evidence.

Mistake: Submitting at the last minute. Fix: Finish at least 48 hours early. That buys time for technical glitches and last-minute review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can international students apply?
A: Yes—eligibility focuses on full-time student status rather than citizenship. Confirm your enrollment type (undergrad, master’s, doctoral, or professional degree) and ensure your team meets the “more than one student” rule.

Q: Can we submit more than one project?
A: Yes. Applicants can submit multiple unique projects, but treat each as a separate entry with its own brief and supporting materials.

Q: Are videos or prototypes required?
A: Not required, but evidence of reduction to practice is strongly recommended. Photos, renderings, bench test results, or short pilot data strengthen your entry.

Q: What disqualifies a project?
A: Projects started before January 1, 2024, projects that have used more than $100,000 in funding, postdoc- or faculty-led projects, and startup-run projects are ineligible.

Q: Do references count toward the two-page limit?
A: No. References can be listed on a separate page and do not count against the two-page Design Brief limit.

Q: How strictly enforced are formatting rules?
A: Very. Font size, margins, and type density rules are enforced. Follow them exactly; it’s not worth risking disqualification for a formatting technicality.

Q: Will we receive feedback if we don’t win?
A: The program sometimes provides summary feedback. Even if formal feedback is limited, saving your brief and reviewers’ notes (if any) can guide resubmissions or other applications.

Q: How is the judging weighted?
A: The simplified rubric divides evaluation into four equal parts: Problem Description (25%), Solution Concept (25%), Reduction to Practice (25%), and Pathway to Implementation (25%).

Next Steps — How to Apply

Ready to apply? Here’s a practical checklist to get you across the finish line:

1. Confirm eligibility: team members are full-time students, project start date after Jan 1, 2024, and prior funding under $100K.
2. Choose the correct track—Advanced Health Systems, Global Health/Humanitarian, or Healthcare Apps/Digital Health.
3. Draft the two-page Design Brief, aligned to the four rubric sections. Prepare a separate references page.
4. Collect team bios, project metadata, and any required declarations for the form.
5. Convert to PDF, test for legibility and formatting, and have at least two outsiders proofread.
6. Submit the application form at least 48 hours before Feb 1, 2026, 11:59 PM EST.

How to Apply

Ready to apply? Visit the official submission form and submit before the deadline:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegOHe3sImA5cTXJYSK8Lx62gIkoaevOhKNu7EHAfoDyv03jg/viewform

For more context and competition details, consult the Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition information page linked from the form. Good luck—if you get your brief into crisp, readable shape, you’ll have a real shot at turning student ingenuity into practical health improvements.