Tech people love to solvecomplex problems,especially if prize money (or probably just pizza) is involved. Sometimes, it takes two years to do it.

Over $30B is spent on preventable hospitalizations. So a health care system in California, New York, and Arizona challenged scientists, researchers, and data experts to develop an algorithm to predict how many days a patient will spend in the hospital. After two years of pouring over available patient data, a team called POWERDOT--made up of researchers from all over the world--won the $500K prize on Monday at the Health Datapalooza forum in DC. We were there to snapHeritage Medical Systems president Mark Wagar, Netherlands-based engineer and software developer Edward de Grijs, Voloridge Investment Management chief scientist David Vogel, Tiberius Data Mining analytics consultant Phil Brierley, and Providence Health & Services EVP Randy Axelrod. Good luck fitting that check in the airplane's overhead storage.

POWERDOT was narrowed down from 1,659 teams and over 35,000 entries.Randy's team's algorithm will help health care providers develop new care plans and strategies to reach patients before health emergencies. The competition will now be extended for a $3M private "master's" competition open to top finishers. But this time the patient data will be less anonymized, giving them access to more details about patient health. Researchers say the outcome has a good chance of completely changing healthcare.