Doctors can look inside you with magnetic fields and pill-mounted cameras. They use robots to perform surgeries and lasers to fix your vision. And yet, in so many other ways, the field of medicine seems stuck in the past. Doctors carry pagers. They make you call them to schedule an appointment. They force new patients—and even old patients with new needs or new insurance—to fill out a bunch of paperwork ... on actual paper.

This is what makes medical hackathons so much fun to read about. Originally the brainchild of Silicon Valley, a hackathon brings people from different fields—clinicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, software developers—together in one place. “We want people to focus on a problem, rather than jumping to the technology,” says Ally Yost, a co-leader of the MIT group Hacking Medicine and a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering. “Many people talk about a problem they’ve observed in their families or something a loved one experienced.”

We're in the early stages of an unprecedented demographic wave which is bringing nearly 10,000 people per day to eligibility age for Medicare. The fact is that we have an aging population many of whom suffer from at least one chronic illness and whose life expectancy has already increased by 9 years in less than a half century as a result of medical innovation. The needs of this population will only increase over their lifetime and we will continually need to seek out new, scalable, more personalized, and consumer-driven solutions.

The expanding U.S. healthcare system faces significant challenges with growing costs and poor outcomes. The Affordable Care Act has taken the initial first steps to address growing costs and poor outcomes by creating outcomes measures that can help determine the value of certain interventions in the healthcare system. Some of those outcomes measures evaluate and seek to improve adherence to treatment, rates of hospital readmission and patient engagement.

As we see the transition to outcome-based compensation progress, it will be even more important for healthcare providers to develop active treatment and preventative solutions to positively affect patient health outside of traditional care sites and avoid predictable events which require costly escalated treatment. All of this while providing an intuitive and seamless patient experience.

Our mission is to DISRUPT this space, in 1 day we'll rethink how healthcare is used at home with a focus on how we can fuse technology, mobile solutions and medical knowledge to make patients lives easier and more enjoyable in the comfort of their own homes. We'll have industry and our own application developers on hand to engage with. Bring your laptops, your brains and big ideas- let's hack!

Teams of 1-4 people must register for the Hackathon on Eventzilla at http://fusehackathon2014.eventzilla.net and on ChallengePost.com as well.

Contest entrants are invited to submit their original idea and a prototype of an operable application that would improve/ benefit healthcare services in the U.S. through improvement in health outcomes in adherence to treatment, rates of hospital readmission and patient engagement or other healthcare at home related topics.  Entrants will need to flesh out concepts, develop wireframes and basic prototypes that illustrate their innovative solution. Entrants are encouraged to use any available health APIs or health data sets such as HealthData.gov.

See submission requirements for details on how to post your projects for judging and awards.

• Creativity & Innovation
  Is the hack more than just another generic social/mobile/local app? Does it do something entirely novel, or at least take a fresh approach to an old problem? Is this a new idea? Does technology like this already exist? How innovative is the concept?
• Technical Difficulty
  Is the hack technically interesting or difficult? Is it just some lipstick on an API, or were there real technical challenges to surmount?
• Intuitive UI/UX
  Is the hack usable in its current state? Is the user experience smooth? Does everything appear to work? Is it well designed? Judges will score the intuitiveness and ease of use for each mobile app entry.
• Usefulness
  Is the hack practical? Is it something people would actually use? Does it fulfill a real need people have? Ability to implement the working prototype within a year’s time.
• Decision Making
  Ability to illustrate how the conceptual designs and working prototype application/tools can promote better outcomes data-driven decision-making related to the outcome measures of treatment adherence, hospital readmission or patient engagement.
• Outcomes Measures Data
  What outcomes measures will be affected by this concept? What valuable data will be created as a result? Can this concept be used to inform outcomes measures in addition to impacting them?
• Benefit for Users/Ease of Use
  Would a patient/provider/administrator use this application? What would patients/providers/administrators gain from their experience using the application? How intuitive is the experience?
• Visual Presentation
  Presentation includes an uploaded app demo video explaining the app. This video should walk the judge through the app, using screen shots to show different features. Please keep the video under five minutes long.
• Value to end-user is clearly defined
  We define value as “save time,” “saves money,” “makes money,” or “is fun and meaningful.” Applications that overlap more than one of these criteria will receive additional points.