“For the coming host departments, we have been keen on collaborating with departments who are facing significant changes to overcome the challenges of the future”, says Rose Marie Henrichsen from BioMedical Design.

Departments that want to meet the challenges of tomorrow

The coming cohort can look forward to spending their Clinical Immersion at three cardiometabolic departments in Central Denmark Region and Region Zealand.
“Since we have an increasing elderly population and will have more multimorbid patients, we have sought departments that demographically and within speciality fits this agenda”, explains Rose Marie Henrichsen who is in charge of the hospital partnership-work at BioMedical Design.
“We are therefore very pleased to announce Cardiology, Nephrology and Endocrinology at North Zealand Hospital, Cardiology at Regional Hospital Viborg and Cardiology at Aarhus University hospital as our coming host departments for 2025-2026”, she continues.

External eyes on hospital work

Every year the BioMedical Design fellows go to observe daily work routines at the regional hospitals. It’s a special and intense part of the fellowship year, where fellows with a background as health professionals can discover their usual work environment from a completely new angle and, for those with other professional backgrounds, it might be their first ‘inside job’ in a hospital setting.

Innovation Challenge 2025 for the Host Hospitals

Each host hospital might have specific challenges they would like the fellows to look into. For the fellowship year 2025-2026 you can read the different Innovation Challenges here.

Numerous needs

The observations of daily work routines and patient treatments lead to sometimes hundreds of needs, that are noted down, categorized, scrutinized, validated at other hospitals, and in the end filtered. At the end of the three months long Clinical Immersion fellows end up with only a few needs that are fit to be solved with a digital or physical solution, which also has the potential to be commercialized.

I am Andreas

I am a medical doctor with a Ph.D. and a diverse background encompassing several specialties, including emergency medicine, psychiatry, otolaryngology, and general practice. My primary motivation as a medical doctor has always been to help people in need and make a meaningful difference in their lives. Throughout my career I realised, that while direct patient care is profoundly rewarding it is also constrained by time, resources, and systemic inefficiencies. These limitations restrict the number of patients I can assist on a daily basis.

This realization sparked my interest in innovation and design thinking as a way to address broader healthcare challenges. By developing new solutions, technologies, or processes, I can potentially impact thousands, if not millions, of lives.

What’s in it for me?

BioMedical Design offers a unique opportunity to bridge my clinical expertise with innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration, allowing me to create solutions that can transform healthcare delivery and leave a lasting legacy.

I applied to this program because I believe it equips participants with the tools, methodologies, and network needed, to drive meaningful change.

The positive side of being a passive observer

Coming from a clinical background where immediate decision-making and active intervention are the norms, it was initially a challenge to step back and adopt the role of an observer. My instinct as a medical professional is always to help, to fix, and to act. However, this observational role offered a rare and invaluable opportunity to gain a more comprehensive and objective understanding of the hospital environment.

By watching processes unfold, I was able to see patterns, inefficiencies, and interactions that aren’t always apparent, when you’re focused on solving individual cases. Instead of reacting to situations, I found myself asking deeper questions such as, “Why is this done this way?” and “Is there a better, more efficient, or safer way, to achieve this?” This shift in perspective enabled me to identify potential areas for improvement that might otherwise be overlooked during routine clinical work. It was an enlightening experience that helped me appreciate the power of stepping back, observing critically, and identifying opportunities, for systemic change.

Seeing things from a different angle

Before this experience, my understanding of hospital workflows was largely shaped by my own role as a clinician. Shadowing staff in various roles — from nurses, doctors and technicians to administrative personnel— gave me a much richer and more nuanced perspective on how the ward operates. I came to appreciate the complexity and interdependence of different tasks and roles within the hospital ecosystem.

A shared understanding helps

What struck me most was how each profession has its own set of responsibilities, challenges, and workflows, which are often not fully visible to others. This lack of transparency can sometimes lead to misunderstandings or inefficiencies. When we visualized these processes through diagrams and shared them with the staff, many were surprised by the insights gained. It helped create a shared understanding and highlighted opportunities for improved collaboration and communication. This experience underscored the importance of seeing healthcare delivery as a team effort where every role is vital to the overall functioning of the ward.

During our two months of observation in the cardiology and endocrinology departments, we documented several hundred observations and issues. These ranged from seemingly minor inconveniences to more significant systemic challenges. Some of these issues were specific to the specialties we observed, while others reflected broader problems seen across healthcare settings, such as workflow inefficiencies, communication gaps, and patient safety concerns.

A need is an opportunity to improve

From these observations, we identified close to 100 specific healthcare needs. These needs encompass a wide range of areas, including patient care quality, workflow optimization, resource management, and challenges faced by healthcare providers. Each identified need represents an opportunity for improvement and innovation. Our goal is to systematically analyze and prioritize these needs based on their impact and feasibility, ensuring that we address the most pressing and transformative opportunities.

Moving forward, we are currently focused on addressing a specific, local need within the host department while simultaneously validating and refining the other identified needs. By engaging with healthcare professionals and stakeholders, we aim to better understand the underlying causes and potential solutions for each challenge.

Killing our darlings

By week 5, we plan to narrow our list down to 2-3 validated needs that show the greatest potential for impact. This validation process involves conducting interviews, analyzing data, and ensuring that the needs we focus on are both significant and solvable. Once we finalize these top needs, we will move into the next phase: selecting one need to develop into a viable solution. This will involve brainstorming, prototyping, and testing potential solutions to ensure they are both effective and implementable within real healthcare settings.

The most profound experience in my learning journey has been witnessing the power and potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. In clinical practice, healthcare professionals often work within their specialized silos. In the BioMedical Design program, I have had the opportunity to work closely with experts from diverse fields, such as engineering, design, business, and technology.

This collaboration has shown me that combining different perspectives, skills, and ways of thinking can lead to innovative solutions that no single discipline could achieve on its own. For example, a clinical problem that might seem insurmountable can be approached in a completely new way when viewed through the lens of an engineer or designer. This cross-disciplinary approach has deepened my appreciation for teamwork and highlighted how innovation thrives at the intersection of different fields. I’m eager to continue leveraging these collaborative experiences to create impactful healthcare solutions.

As the philosophy of the BMD Programme is the interdisciplinary teamwork that allows for both a 360 degree look of a clinical need as well as a qualified evaluation of solutions, we were a bit concerned about the overlapping backgrounds of our team members and which competences we would be missing to bring real improvements to healthcare. Nonetheless, we quickly realised that the interpersonal relationships and the distribution of various roles and responsibilities was a much stronger driver for group success than the experiences we each brought with us.  

A little more than a month after forming our group, a large task was approaching. We had to do a pitch on the needs and solutions we were working on to gain feedback from the BMD staff and advisors. At this point we were still working on four different needs and we had the opportunity to go to Aalborg to explore one of them in detail. We put ourselves in the position of the patients by participating as test persons in a trial, working to improve the diagnosis of opportunistic infections in the lungs. 

Participating in the test took a lot of time and although it meant we had little time to do the presentation, we learned how valuable it was to really engage in the needs we worked on. We realised that we were a strong team with great executive skills that could quite quickly do a high quality presentation and allow time for other tasks. Our personal and professional competences complement each other really well and from this point on we knew that team Phoenix were going to go far.  

Too many needs, too many solutions

Initially, we worked on four different needs, all in different clinical fields. This was a bit complicated, as we all were so eager to learn and wanted to participate in meetings, ideation sessions and take on even more clinical validation to better qualify the most promising solution. We liked bringing our different competencies into play, but also found it difficult to balance the deep immersion that you need in a specific area to develop promising solutions with keeping all four needs open and trying to weigh them against each other. Therefore, we finally chose to focus solely on one concept. And funny enough, it was probably the concept we all had the best gut-feeling about all along.  

Focus, get out and accelerate 

Focusing on our favourite solution, we really professionalised our team. It was around this time that we also took on specific responsibility areas and were able to accelerate our journey. In the process we have been in contact with researchers and key opinion leaders in Denmark, UK, US and Australia, we have visited multiple departments to gain direct user-feedback, and examined the procurement and manufacturing pathways, as well as investigated relevant investors and advisors, that are essential for bringing our product to market.  

The greatest gain, besides founding the team, is getting to know the rest of the fantastic 21/22 BMD cohort.

BMD is more than just an exceptional postgraduate programme. It is an amazing chance to create new strong bonds with likeminded people in a crazy inspiring environment. Participating in the BMD programme really has been an outstanding experience for the four of us. Following the programme, Rasmus will start a new position as an innovation consultant at Rigshospitalet and Mette will start her medical specialisation. Tore and Marcus will devote full time to our project and have support from Rasmus and Mette, who will participate part-time. We are so excited about the journey that we take on together and feel so fortunate to have spent 10 months of personal and professional development with our fantastic co-fellows.  

Despite being 1) an engineer; 2) a man; and 3) having zero professional medical experience, this week I began observations in a gynaecology and obstetrics department.

Four weeks ago, I became a Fellow on the Novo Nordisk Foundation BioMedical Design Fellowship. Since the start of the programme, I - and the seventeen other fellows - have received a thorough introduction to the many facets of value creation within healthcare.

We’ve covered most of Denmark for a range of workshops and seminars on a variety of topics including need statements, health economics, MedTech innovation, the Danish healthcare system and more.

---

In between we’ve met and spoken with numerous experts and advisors; been onboarded at our clinical hosts; and even found the time to get to know each other.

The ultimate objective of the programme is to produce impactful healthcare innovations, built on a foundation of in-clinic observations, the first ‘proper’ phase of the programme (Clinical Immersion).

The central aspect of needs-based innovation is what initially drew me to the programme. All too often, and speaking from painful prior experience,  this problem-identifying step is rushed, or ignored completely.

This emphasis on problem finding, combined with a cohort of skilled fellows, and the potential of our solutions to create a meaningful impact made joining the programme a no-brainer.

After the completion of the immersion phase, our focus will shift to solution creation and commercial development, where needs identified in-clinic are developed into refined solutions and prototypes.

Although my background in technology research and development appears better suited to the latter stages of the programme, the boot camp stage has me feeling ready to get started.

I feel prepared, but also a little apprehensive. I understand the expectations of a fellow on the programme, but I have no idea what I am going to experience.

What am I going to see? How will I be received by patients? What is it like observing a birth? Will I uncover any unmet needs? Will they be any good?

Time, as we have been told on many occasions so far, to lean into the process.

When our group constellation, Team InnoPatient, was announced, we all had a lot of questions and wondered why the BioMedical Design program had placed us together, but it turned out that they had seen something in our group dynamic that we hadn’t. Since all three of us had been used to working independently in previous work, we naturally spent some time finding each other and learning how we could make the best use of each others’ resources.  

Our group process has really been characterized by giving each other space, and listening to each other. This led us to have a group dynamic where we worked together on every task for a long time. We kind of had a fear of missing out on some of the learnings. We finally addressed this at one of our monthly ambition meetings and decided that we should try to assign areas of responsibility. Even though we all strongly agreed this was the best strategy, it was kind of hard for us to adapt, however in the end we did manage to assign areas of responsibility.  

Go on a road trip you want – get out of the building you must

The process of working on a solution 

Exploring the solution was a long and iterative process with a lot of ideation sessions with different external actors and stakeholders. We started the process with both physical and online ideation sessions, where we invited relevant professionals from the group’s network for “quick and dirty” ideation sessions. From the sessions, we brought the best ideas out to healthcare professionals at Aalborg Hospital to get feedback on what they thought would best fit into their practice. From this, one final idea for a solution was selected to work further on.  

In the group, we worked internally on prototypes with experiments on how the solution should both look-like and work-like. In this phase, we had a lot of hands-on experience with sewing, molding our own test materials, 3D modeling, and sound testing with different materials. In an iterative process, we received feedback from health professionals and sound experts on the further development of the look, shape, and function of the solution.  

One of the things that our group, in particular, learned was that when you get that occasional concern from stakeholders or bad comments, it doesn’t mean that everything is lost or you didn’t do well. It just means that you need to correct your direction and take their concerns into your design of the solution.  

Ups and downs

We encountered a lack of willingness to pay for our solution, even though it was a well documented problem that needed a solution. The lack of willingness to pay zapped some of the group’s spirit and we uncovered some of the other needs we had observed, but decided to return to the neonatal need and soldiered on as we believed, we were in the right to fight for the silent patient’s sleep and well-being.  

What is our current situation?

We have currently given the knowledge and rights to the BioMedical Design program, who will hopefully be able to find others who want to complete the project. 

Example of different working process 

An example of these differences was the process of preparing our two project pitches. In our first pitch we got started a bit too late (according to Maria) and ended up working until 4 am the night before (over zoom and not having time to practice) the pitch. Second time we tried turning the process around and prepared our slide in good time (maybe TOO good time for Zohaib) and spend the last 2 days practicing. In both cases we ended up with a good result, and Kristine learnt a lot about how both ways have benefits, while Maria and Zohaib had to admit that there are different ways reaching a goal.   

Working with needs and solutions

In our group we have worked with 3 different needs, and many different solutions for each need. We are probably the group with the most pivots and we have cast aside a solution to pursue one of our other ideas more than 3 times. This has been highly challenging and very fruitful for our learning process. We have been highly aware not to fall in love with a solution until we validated with the users and completed thorough desk-top research and tried our best to be aware of what we saw and heard in the clinic. Therefore, we also continued to visit the clinic until the very last month of the program and kept finding new experts and new knowledge to ad to our solution space. Doing a pivot and discharging an idea or solution can be frightening when you are in a time limited program like the BMD, however, to control this process Pernille (our team mentor) taught us to park our ideas, instead of killing them. A trick we are very thankful for as our final solution spent 2 months in the parking zone until we realised the twist that was needed to develop it into the product we have today.  

Status of the CareFold project

The status of our project is that we have decide to continue working on our product. Kristine will be working full time doing product development after the summer holiday and Maria and Zohaib will support the project while working their regular jobs. Going further, we agreed to lean in and trust each other.  

Align and learn together 

Our team consisted of Søren who is a medical doctor with experience in different specialities and Tine who is a researcher with a background in biomedical engineering. As the programme is intense and you have to work closely in the teams, we put a lot of effort in aligning and understanding each other’s expectations from the beginning. It has been interesting to work closely with one person where you need to compromise and find common interests for the project to be equally motivated. As a team you learn both individually and together and are pushed to explore barriers and corners outside your comfort zones.   

Speaking a common language

Even though we have two different backgrounds in our team, we quickly realized that our “language” was quite similar due to Tine’s interest and working experience in the clinical environment and Søren’s interest in the technical elements of hospital equipment. As we were not so different in our knowledge and working habits, the teamwork seemed to develop relatively effortlessly. In a team of two persons the interdisciplinarity is limited and thus, we took the opportunity to seek interdisciplinary inputs to a larger extent among our co-fellows and through the massive BMD-network.  

Identifying needs

We have been in the clinic to do observations and to find needs. This was an individual process where all fellows brought their observations into the team. This included both different observations and overlapping observations, which led to clarifying discussions in the team. The team process of narrowing down all the identified needs was dependent on many elements including interests, competences and ambition levels.  

Creative, crazy and cool ideas  

Iterating for a suited solution 

We work with a high risk/high reward project and it is always interesting to talk to different people even with the same professional background as they identify the risks associated with the project differently. The unmet need we try to address has been difficult to attack until we tried flipping it and asked what THIS solution could do compared to state of the art.  

There have been ups and downs during the project. The learning curve has been steep and it has been challenging to make the right strategies. Right now we work on de-risking specific areas of the project and we attempt to acquire funding to proceed. We feel obligated to try to find out if our solution can be a candidate solution to this important unsolved problem. 

The BioMedical Design Programme (BMD) is an intense 10-month experience loaded with tons of

invaluable learnings. Here are some of the reasons we, Team Inventricle, think we got 5 years wiser in 10 months.

Since interdisciplinary teamwork is a cornerstone of the BMD programme, there was a lot of

excitement leading up to the team announcement and team building seminar. We were lucky to

be placed in a very diverse team, with both engineers, doctors and a nurse. At the seminar we

were introduced to the phases you have to go through to become a high performing team –

Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. Like most other teams we also had to go through

these and it wasn’t always easy. But we learned a lot about each other and our team dynamics

along the way. One thing that we implemented was to have a “facilitator of the week”. That made

sure that everyone had the opportunity to plan and direct the team in the tasks at hand, and we

learned that our team worked a lot better when someone explicitly took the role of facilitator.

Get out of the building

See one, do one, and raise the bar

During the programme, a general learning concept is the “See one, do one” concept. Monday

could be filled with inspiring teaching from domain experts, and then the rest of the week is for

you to go out and try what you’ve learned in your specific project. This is an excellent way to

make knowledge stick with long term memory. In addition, outcomes are frequently shared

between the teams to inspire each other. A sense of healthy competition among the teams

helped us all raise the bar for what can be done, like going across the planet to validate a need or

meet with key opinion leaders.

Never too late to pivot

During our time at the programme we have heard many tales of all the amazing pivots that have

happened in the previous cohorts. Luckily, we got to try one ourselves as well, and hopefully it will

be added to the list that the future fellows will hear about.

We only had about 6 weeks left before the final pitch when we decided to pivot and focus on

children with urinary incontinence instead of collection of urine samples, so we had a lot to do in

a very short time. But we learned that this time we could really divide and conquer because we

had learned so much the first time around. It made it a really fun and exciting experience to try

and get as much as possible done in such a short time. We managed to talk to a lot of

stakeholders and interview several parents and children in both Denmark and the USA. We even

did a Facebook campaign to understand more about our potential customers and the willingness

to pay.

Pitching

All of this led us to the culmination of the programme, which was the final pitch. All through the

programme we have been training our pitching skills both formally and informally. This is such a

valuable skill no matter what you do – to be able to clearly communicate a need and idea to

anyone no matter what their background is, and in a way that they will remember it afterwards.

While I am not experienced with tech-things like 3D-printing, digital prototyping or electronic devices, I am certainly always up for a challenge. I love learning new skills and for this reason, I was particularly excited about the prototyping workshops, we had as part of the Creative Skills Phase.

My background is nursing but…

I want to challenge status quo

I applied for the BioMedical Design programme because I sought to broaden my horizons and challenge myself professionally. In my job, I felt I was beginning to increasingly accept bad or mediocre solutions because of the narrative “that’s just how it is”.
I want to continuously be able to challenge the status quo and therefore the BMD programme felt like a perfect match for me. Learning about design thinking and improving my skills as a facilitator have been some of my favourite parts of the programme so far, and these are skills I will be able to use in my future career, whatever it may bring.

Going on a learning journey

On March 10^th, 2022, my teammate Gülçin and I took a train from Aarhus Central station at 5.55 am. We had a long day ahead of us. We were scheduled to visit the Danish Technical University (DTU) in Lyngby and spend the entire day being introduced to the Aduino platform. At DTU we met Jacob Pedersen who described himself as an electronics design engineer and all round hacker. He assured us that he was used to teaching coding to kids at summer camps, and it would be easy-going.

The AHA-moment

Knowing the electronic field is good

I am still far from being a programmer, but this was such a cool introduction to an area that I had no prior knowledge about. Now I know that it is possible to do various electronic prototypes without spending significant money or time on it! We are currently experimenting with ultrasound modalities in my team, but since our concept and idea is constantly evolving, we cannot know if we will pivot into a new solution next week. Luckily, we have an electronics-engineer with experience in this field on my team, but the insight I got into coding and user design really benefits me in a way, that I too can be a part of this.

Future possibilities

We are now in the Commercial Skills Phase with the focus of further developing our solution while concomitantly looking into our Intellectual Property, business models and funding strategies. We have a lot of things to do in the next few months, and I am excited to see how far we will be with our solution by the end of the programme.

Teambuilding kicked us off

The teams were announced at a seminar, which also provided the framework for getting to know your teammates and how you collaborate. I was pleasantly surprised by how the teambuilding activities made it clear to us how we worked as a team and which pitfalls we should look out for. 

• 

• 

Following the teambuilding activities, our first job was to fill out our team mission. This forced us to quickly discuss up front what we saw as the strengths and weaknesses of our new team. It also made the foundation for creating a safe space to discuss insecurities and doubts. At the end of the team announcement seminar, we were filled up with positive energy and knowledge about what we would expect going forward in the program as teams, and we were eager to get started.

New week, new demands.

My team counts three team members, all with different backgrounds. I’m a biomedical engineer myself, Thorkild is a medical doctor and Christoffer is a physiotherapist and a health tech consultant. Naturally we have different ways of thinking, which I see as a big strength. However, being a team member also means being well aligned with your teammates, figuring out how to share knowledge and observations between each other and last but not least how to settle on the needs you want to bring forward into the creative skills phase.

Not left to our own devices

Throughout the program there are scheduled mentor sessions for each team and mid-December was our first session. The team mentor is mainly there to guide us through the ups and downs. For our first session we talked about why we were put in a team together, and it made a lot of sense going over what we had in common and where we would complement each other. Getting personal feedback on that level can be daunting, but it is definitely a great opportunity to help you get to know yourself better both individually and in the team constellation.

It is not all fun and games, or is it?

In a couple of days, the Christmas holidays are upon us, and we as a team have met our first major deadline of handing in our need specification documents. It has been hard, but great teamwork does make the work more fun. I’m definitely looking forward to learning more and to enter the creative skills phase with my team. I’m sure it is going to be both interesting and a lot of fun.

As we rang in 2021 from home, the Biomedical Design fellows also entered the creative phase – from home.

Grounded by Covid-19

But it wasn’t an easy journey. The impacts of COVID-19 were still very much felt around the globe. The situation kept evolving and we were ultimately forced to work from home. So how much play can you actually do during lockdown? Thanks to Pernille’s quick thinking and ability to adapt, she redesigned the whole curriculum to work in an online space. And from my perspective, it actually worked out for the best!

New situation – new tools

We kicked-off the creative phase by migrating to Miro, an online collaborative tool, that works pretty much like an electronic whiteboard. It was the perfect medium for doing all the fun activities lined up to exercise our creativity. We started out by unpacking the healthcare needs we had identified by working on a creative design brief. This was quickly followed by the introduction of ideation tools and techniques, with the help of Syddansk Sundhedsinnovation, Randi Lehmann (The “Crazy 8s” is one of my favourites).

Rapid prototyping

Using random materials that we could find at home, we were also trained in creating rapid prototypes for our ideas. Given a very short time limit, we were forced to be quick, resourceful, and effective in translating our imagination to something malleable. This proved fun and useful for us in coming up with solutions – ranging all the way from the silly to the promising ones.

Testing, testing, testing

Equipped with the necessary facilitation skills we were able to go out and ideate with external experts and contacts. We were also fortunate to learn from IDEO U teaching lead, Bre Przestrzelski, on the essentials in facilitating co-creative sessions. In collaboration with the Kitchen, Aarhus University’s start-up hub, Pernille prepared two ideation sessions for us to practice our facilitation skills in. Leaning into the program’s timeline, my team, composed of Camilla Waldstrøm, Mercedes Marin, and I, organised four online external ideation sessions with 20 experts from various fields. Tapping into our new learnings, we were able to successfully come up with clearer solution directions for our healthcare needs. To break out of our zoom fatigue, we would sometimes sneak out and work together in person 🙂

And even more testing

To help us see if the solution fits our users, Randi Lehmann returned to give us a workshop on scenario training. This was a very fun workshop where we had to role-play our users in an online space to uncover gaps in the solution. Pernille then invited Martin Ibsen and Peter Lindberg of Syndicate for a very insightful idea exploration and value proposition workshop to help us unwrap the value and potential of our healthcare solution ideas. Martin and Peter challenged us to test our solution hypotheses by testing out our pretotype. My team rose up to the challenge by organising a rapid test on 30 participants over 5 days. Our efforts paid off as this revealed how a small focused experiment can help set the direction of our product development. My team celebrated by sledding down a snow hill and clinking a glass or two (or three).

Structure and formality are needs-to-have after all

Of course, not everything is fun and games, throughout this phase. We were also challenged by issues and sensitivities regarding idea ownership. This was really highlighted by instances where teams working on similar topics had to ideate internally with the same group of people. For me, this emphasized the importance of confidentiality and the use of non-disclosure agreements. It also offered an opportunity for self-reflection, and allowed us to re-visit our team values.

Time for a pitch

At the end of the creative phase, we were tasked to pitch our ideas to the Biomedical Design advisory group. We were nervous, but it turned out to be such a pleasant culmination for all the hard work we have done in this phase. It allowed us to consolidate all our results and bring our ideas one step closer to becoming a start-up. Looking back at what we just went through, Pernille’s creative phase curriculum exceeded my expectations. I might not know how it is sans lockdown, but all I can say is, I wouldn’t have done it any other way. 

I’ve been a nurse for seven years and I take a bit of pride in being good at placing IVs and a bit more pride in being helpful towards my colleagues. But here I am doing neither, because as a BioMedical Design fellow, my role is to observe things and not actually do things. And that makes a whole lot of sense.

Seeing with the eyes of the beginner

When I was still a nursing student, I became aware of a well-known paradox in healthcare: New healthcare workers are often the ones who are most able to see what systemic problems a hospital ward has. Yet they are also the least likely to be able to change things. I experienced this paradox myself.

Accepting the system

When I just started working as a nurse I questioned even the simplest things like how we measure vital signs. But after a couple of months I became blind to problems – working in the system every day is really hard if you don’t start accepting it. And after working in a place a couple of years, I’ve found myself being the person inadvertently explaining the optimism out of my new colleagues with tales of why things are the way they are.

A chance to improve things

So, when I was accepted to the BioMedical Design fellowship, I was excited to try and get back to seeing things with new eyes – but this time, with the expressed goal of improving healthcare. The first part of the fellowship was partly about getting into a mindset of the BioMedical Design process, and partly about getting to know the other fellows.

Not acting, just watching

This second part has been about making observations in healthcare so we can find out what needs the hospital has. So, while holding myself back from offering my help to other nurses takes some willpower, the results are valuable. From not doing, I was able to observe the process through which a failed attempt at placing an IV led to a long delay for a procedure and engaged two nurses, one doctor and a nurse anaesthetist, who was finally able to place the IV.

Construction need statements

I’ve come out of this phase of the fellowship with 40 pages of observations from different parts of the hospital. I’ve observed shifts with doctors, nurses, nurse assistants, cleaning personnel, technicians and more, all the while trying to look for the things that can be improved. Using these observations to develop need statements has been a new exercise for me, but having the other fellows to spar with in this process has been invaluable. After developing these statements, we pitched them to each other. Again, unknown territory for me, but a way to qualify our future work where the statements are the basis for making solutions that satisfy the observed healthcare needs. And also, a sign of things to come when we need to pitch these solutions to healthcare providers in the spring.

Working towards a common goal

The most amazing thing about the program really is the other fellows. Working towards a common goal of finding ways to improve healthcare, together with people who are really talented in their individual fields is beyond inspiring. Getting to observe and talk to people all through the hospital has been vital for uncovering needs, but I’m really happy that we are at the point now where we are grouping up and going to utilise all these competencies, that we have to solve some of the problems in healthcare!

From systematic to crazy

At the beginning of the Creative Skills phase in January we had four needs. Now it was time to find the best and most innovative solutions for the needs. From one day to the next we had to put away all that systematic and model-based thinking from the need selection phase and open our minds for wild and crazy ideas. The more ideas, the better. The mindset was to think like a child and discard all your biases. In order to encourage this new approach, we were given a present – an ideation box full of clay, beads, balloons, cardboard, hot glue, and much more. The scene was set, this was to be playful.  We started out with two full weeks of concentrated ideation on solutions for our needs.

Building on other’s ideas

The ideation process is a teamwork process where you get better ideas by building on each other’s ideas. Our ideas were very different because we are different people with different backgrounds. In order to build on each other’s ideas, we learned to communicate our ideas in nonverbal ways with simple drawings and fast prototypes. For me this was turning my spare time interest of art drawing into a professional and fun way of communicating.

Creativity in my personal and professional life

Back to systematic thinking

Having generated close to a hundred concept ideas we became more systematic again. We started to research, select and verify our ideas. We looked at technical feasibility and put ourselves in the shoes of our users in order to come up with the best possible solution. Again, we used our combined skills and network. For me this is where my technical knowledge has come into play.

It’s all coming together

We have now selected among our needs and ideas and are down to one concept idea. With that concept in hand we are entering the business and device development phase. In the coming months we will be developing a business model and a prototype of our concept idea. The creativity, the technical feasibility, and user feedback will go hand in hand in order to develop the best possible solution.

A doctor’s tale of the need statement journey

Seeing the call for applications back in Nov. 2018, I immediately knew I had to apply for a position in the Biomedical Design Novo Nordisk Foundation Fellowship Program for two reasons.

1) I’m a medical doctor, and prior to joining the fellowship program, I held a specialty position towards becoming a general practitioner. With my future position as a general practitioner, I believe I have the obligation to not only help my patients, but also participate in improving the healthcare system to ensure we can handle the many challenges ahead.

2) Furthermore, I am fortunate to be married to an innovation consultant in the municipality of Aarhus, and she always seemed to have the right questions for challenging my assumptions on the delivery and administration of healthcare. 

How to find the needs

The fellowship teaches a needs-led approach to innovation which generally is in opposition to technology led innovation. In needs led innovation, the theory is that any great invention starts with a great and well characterized need. So how do you find these needs? Well you go out and observe.

You too have observed a need

I believe any person who is in contact with the healthcare system has. Just consider waiting times – have you ever complained about waiting in line at your GP? Or experienced that you have a difficulty of getting hold of staff at a hospital?

A need is more than just a need

What characterises a great need however, is not just identifying a problem – it is about investigating the problem, uncovering all aspects of the problem, why isn’t it solved yet, and what would be the outcome if solved and at which price?

Need, solution and then?

Furthermore, as the fellowship is not only focused on innovation but also on entrepreneurship (great ideas are nothing until they are realised), one must take into account that a solution to a great need holds the potential of a future business. All of these measures must be considered when deciding which needs to pursue.

The Need Specification document

To uncover the aspects of the needs we have identified, each team have made a Need Specification Document (NSD) of our four best needs. A NSD is a 15-20 pages report on a need with a detailed analysis of the background for the need (the medical and organisational fundamentals), an investigation of existing solutions, a stakeholder analysis and a market analysis.

Challenging the needs

Creating such a document has challenged, not only our observed needs (many were dropped during our research and validation), but also the teamwork. When four people are investigating multiple needs, what often happens is that we each have our favourite needs, which we investigate. Consequently it is difficult to maintain the high level of knowledge across all team members, which is needed to craft a NSD.

New needs come to life

Furthermore our team decided to bring forth a new need which had spun out of an existing need, quite late in the process (1 week before deadline). As a consequence we had to speed-investigate, and validate the need and craft a NSD.

Done with the NSD

Crafting the NSD’s has proven to be a greater challenge than I anticipated. It really required the best of all team members abilities and both long and stressful days. Consequently handing in the documents late December which also marked the end of our clinical immersion phase, was a great relief. We are now awaiting feedback on the NSD’s from who we believe are key opinion leaders within the medical fields of our needs, and have entered a new phase of the fellowship; the creative skills phase.

Leaning in to a new phase

Finally we will stop investigating and validating the needs, and begin to ideate solutions. Compound Annual Growth Rates, confidence intervals and root cause analysis have been replaced by drawings, rapid prototyping and an attitude of playfulness and creativity. During our clinical immersion we did our best not to think in solutions, but obviously it was difficult to retain from. However, one week into the creative skills phase it is clear that our creativity is thriving in the new framing, which has been applied to the fellowship.

Webinar about the BioMedical Design Programme

If you have unanswered questions about the BioMedical Design Novo Nordisk Foundation Fellowship Programme then you should watch this webinar. It can tell you more about the learning process and some examples of why people have applied, and what they think about the learning process.

I’m Roeen Roashan. I come from a business background, with an MBA from 2012. After working as a health technology analyst for more than six years, I decided to start my own health-tech company in 2018, focusing on oral health. A year in, I decided to pivot into geriatric oral care and hospital oral care, but discovered that an entirely different innovation model is needed. As a result it led to me applying for the BioMedical Design program in Copenhagen.

To get inside the clinic

My overarching goal with the program is to adopt a solid methodology for innovating in healthcare – a model that significantly increases the likelihood of actually reaching a point of impact to patients, healthcare providers and other key stakeholders in healthcare. An exhaustive understanding of healthcare’s complex structures is a prerequisite for better execution, and for this you need to ‘get out of the building’, which is often difficult to do in healthcare. Because of the unique insider perspective into clinical practices that the Biomedical Design program offers, I have already found my participation to be extremely valuable, and we are only two months into the program.

Learning the fundamentals of our clinical field

The fellowship started with a four-week boot camp that helped me gain a foundational knowledge of medicine, in the field that my team and I will be innovating within, namely nephrology. Part of the boot camp has been to receive lectures by some of the most specialized doctors within their area of expertise, and I have found this part to be highly valuable. Coming from a business background, I took the role of ‘not knowing anything’, and therefore asking many questions without hesitation.

Field work kills assumptions

There is a stark contrast to including field work or observational studies in the development of a new product or solution, and not including such input. You are prone to making many naive assumptions when you have not done field work. This does not mean that success is contingent upon doing field work, but I certainly believe it increases the likelihood of it. To me, field work is about discovering the fundamental truth, and as more truth is unveiled, it cannot be ignored. That is perhaps the ultimate beauty of going through such process. Here’s a bit of honesty – I did very little field work when starting my own company, but it will undoubtedly play a key role for future products.

Observing at the hospital

Although I have worked in the field of health technology, I have not spent much time inside hospitals. For our team it was quite unique to really get around all different functions at the Department of Nephrology, Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen. Each team member rotated around the different wards and treatment centers, for the collection of data, which were then reviewed on a daily basis by the entire team.
Our main challenge was to disseminate all of our individual observations to one another, but as we progressed in the clinical immersion phase, we got better at filtering out our non-essentials.

From 30 to four needs

At this point, we have narrowed down a list of 30 qualified commercial needs down to four key needs that we will be validating in the coming months. That implies having to turn away from 26 needs that could have potentially brought some level of improvement to patients or doctors. That being said, each team member was aligned as to which four needs we should proceed with, and picking these was therefore a simple process.

Now validating our key needs

Our four key needs are some of the most pressing issues in nephrology today – at least our observations say so. We are embarking on a critical validation process in the coming weeks, and it will be clearer whether or not the team’s current direction is good or not. I was happy to see that the team members were more or less aligned with one another in choosing top needs.
We are an ambitious team, and the combination of each team member’s past experience is really our differentiator. As we approach the creative skills phase, I would really like the interdisciplinary element of our team to flourish, and my gut feeling says it will.

My name is Chantelle Driever and I am one of the lucky 8 Aarhus fellows for 2019/20. I have a background in biomedical and biomolecular engineering, and in recent years I had a shop selling baby items, so my experience spans both science and business.

Breathtaking beginning
The first days as a fellow were a whirlwind. Heading into the program I was both excited and intimidated knowing that my ‘fellow fellows’ were going to bring a lot to the table. But it is the first time for all of us, and I quickly realized that we were all just as nervous and excited as each other.

Jampacked learning process
The first stage of the fellowship is the Boot Camp and it’s been a crash course in developing the tools and expertise needed as an ethnographic researcher in a hospital setting. Each day we’ve learned something new, and the classes are very hands-on and engaging. In fact, one thing that surprised me was just how exhausted I’ve been at the end of each workday. There is a lot of new information to absorb in a relatively short time frame, but this has actually enhanced my enthusiasm for coming to work each day. I’ve learned to love learning and curiosity again, something that is easy to forget as an adult.

Paint outside the paper
From day one of Boot Camp we were expected to think creatively and outside the box, which helped us learn how to become comfortable beyond our comfort zones. Being crafty and sometimes even borderline silly with ideas is encouraged, so we spent many hours drawing stick figures and playing with hot glue and pipe cleaners.

… and it’s ok to be crazy
The program encourages a safe space where there are no wrong answers; the only person judging you is yourself. As an engineer and high achiever, unlearning the idea of perfectionism was daunting for me, but it will be crucial for the next stages of the program.

Some of the key elements

• Intro to design thinking and a mini run-through of the biomedical design process
• Getting to know the other fellows through short presentations
• Ethnographic methods (Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures)
• Learning about our designated field (for me it was ear-nose and throat or ENT in Aarhus)
• Teaming up – finding out our groups of 4 teammates for the remainder of the program

Next step Clinical Immersion
As we enter the next phase of the BMD program where we spend time observing in the hospital, I feel prepared with background knowledge of the field and tools to record relevant observations. There are some aspects of being in the hospital that can’t be taught in the boot camp stage, but with the skills, knowledge and open-mindedness I have cultivated during the first four weeks, I am sure it will be a successful venture.

 

– BioMedical Design fellows doing their clinical immersion on otolaryngology, gastroenterology and nephrology

The new classes of BioMedical Design fellows got together at the old Skjoldnæsholm Castle on Zealand to mark the transition from boot camp to clinical immersion. At the meet up fellows learned their clinical focus area and their team mates for the next nine months. During Clinical immersion fellows will observe clinical staff to spot important needs in a specific hospital ward. The goal is to help solve needs by developing new devices and technology.

The two Aarhus teams are both concentrating their needs-finding in the ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgery department at Aarhus University Hospital. Teams (and their tentative names) are:
Team Prominens: Kasper Linde Christensen, Naja Villadsen, Christian Friis and Jasper Nijkamp
And

Team invENT: Martin Knudsen, Chantelle Driever, Lene Ladegaard Larsen and Sebastian Udholm
Department of Otorhinolaryngology, or ear, nose and throat (ENT) covers a broad spectrum of diseases such as hearing loss, tinnitus, dizziness, facial nerve disordes as well as infections and cancer in the ear, nose and throat area.

The Copenhagen teams are (also by working titles):

Team Renaid: Nina Puch Ørnskov, Staffan Holmberg-Thydén, Roeen Roashan and Louise Engel Balling. They will be observing at the Nephrology Clinic at Rigshospitalet where experts work to prevent and treat kidney failure.

Reactions on the new medical focus
Nina Puch Ørnskov, previously an anesthesia nurse, was happy about her new clinical area.
“Nephrology is interesting to me because of all the rather complicated machines used for dialysis. It’s great to look at something this complex with fresh eyes.”
Roeen Roashan, whose background is business and as a senior analyst, originally had a preference for gastroenterology. After learning the nephrology focus, he says:
“I’m happy to go to nephrology. When I look at the heavy problems connected to the patient experience I think we can work with the patient’s quality of life. I think we can find a window for incremental and radical innovation.”

The Green Team: Marie Parslov, Cecilie Ammitzbøll, Chris Gibbs and Rastislav Monosik observing at the Surgical Gastroenterology Department at Rigshospitalet, specialized in (among others) cancer in the upper gastrointestinal tract and late complications from stomach surgery.

More tech solutions awaits
Copenhagen fellow Rastislav Monosik from the Green Team has a background in food chemistry and technology. He is one of four men in the Copenhagen group that consists of one engineer, one holds an MBA, two doctors, one industrial designer, one anesthesia nurse and one nurse who also holds a degree in IT-development.
“I was very happy to go to an area with a lot of technological tools and some robotic solutions. I like the combination of the human factor and tech, and establishing synergy between them. In a near future I think manual labor will be replaced by technology and robots to a much larger extent, including at the hospitals.”

Strong need for innovation
Consulting surgeon at the Surgical Gastroenterology Clinic at Rigshospitalet, Michael Achiam, is thrilled to have the four fellows of the Green Team innovating at ‘his’ ward.
“We experience an explosion in the rise of patients, and our recourses haven’t changed accordingly. But even if our time is scarce we love to have the fellows here, because we need innovation to optimize our working processes to fit the new standards.”

BioMedical Design Inauguration Day

September 2nd 2019

At Biomedical Design we want to empower talents in need led health innovation. We do that with the intention of supplying Danish healthcare, Danish research institutions and the Danish health tech industry with innovation leaders who come with a more holistic view of all what it takes. From identifying a problem to putting a solution in front of the user. It is a complex field to navigate in, and that is why we see there is a need for people who understand the whole process, who know how to reach out to the right people at the right moments of the process, to get the right help.

Meaningful Innovation that Matters
We want to have more innovation leaders in health care, because innovation matters to people. It really impacts peoples’ quality of life that we make good innovation, specially people who get sick or disabled. That’s why we should do it well. We should make meaningful innovation which matters to people.

A Push Back from Health Care Payers
However, we need to be careful about the approach we take, when we innovate. And right now I would say the value chain of innovating for health care is about to be broken. Historically it has been a very technology driven process where health care payers happily paid what it cost to take in all the innovation that companies developed. But now we see that there is a push back from the health care payers. They simply can’t afford all the good ideas and good solutions coming from the industry.

New Health Innovators are Needed
We need people who can approach the innovation of health care from a new perspective and yet make it beneficial for all parties in the value chain. We believe that the BioMedical Design Programme is one of the answers to this this dilemma. That’s why we have put together a ten months full time fellowship program in which we today enroll 16 very talented people who are skilled in each their domain, and during the next ten months will become skilled health innovators too.

The Boot Camp
The first month is a boot camp where we’ll give the fellows a basic introduction to the different clinical fields they’ll enter. To do observations and find problems. We’ll teach them health ethnography. Teach them small introductions to design thinking, something they’ll work with more deeply later. They’ll get to know each other and after the first month they will be put in teams of four with whom they’ll be together for the rest of the fellowship. They might not like their team mates all the time throughout these ten months. But that is also a part of the learning process. You have to learn to navigate and solve team issues.

Clinical Immersion
Then they’ll be immersed into different clinical fields. Two teams will have their base at Rigshospitalet in Surgical Gastroenterology and Nephrology and here in Aarhus the fellows will do their Clinical Immersion in the Ears-Nose-and-Throat department (Otolaryngology). In this process they will identify innumerable problems. Small problems, local problems but also some needs which have not been identified before. Not even by the staff working there. During four weeks they will be exploring widely, and then they will go through a process to narrow them down to 12 needs and validate these.

Big Impact Required
Validation means, that fellows have to go out and interview people in the clinic and ask: “Have I understood this clinical need?”, “Do you agree that it exists?”, and go out and see if they can retrieve the same situation in other hospital settings in Denmark and abroad. That is all sort of the qualitative identification of needs. Then they have to support in a more quantitative manner – digging down into literature and databases, looking for numbers which can support that there is a true problem and where there is a possibility to create a big impact even though fellows don’t know, what could be the solution yet.

Creative Skills
Innovation is not happening without getting good ideas. For some people it is easy to get good ideas and for others it is difficult – but this is a skill you can learn and that’s why we are working with it in the creative skills phase. Training the ability to come up with great ideas and to build on the ideas of others. To build on ideas that are out there in the world already, but improving them – and help solve issues that previous ideas haven’t solved.

Validation
In that process they will generate many ideas and again these ideas have to be validated if they are the right type of solution to the right need. It will be a challenging process because fellows will experience lots of insecurity. There are heaps of questions popping up. “Can it technically be done?”, “Has somebody already gotten this idea and patented it?”. “Damn, yes!” – and you have to go back to another solution. It’s a back and forth process, but the fellows are actually quite lucky, because while they are at this program they can work on multiple ideas at the same time. It’s a horse race – but they don’t need to go that far back to pick up another need and another solution – for sure they will end up with something.

Commercial Skills
Finally, we have the Commercial Skills phase. At this point fellows have two great ideas, and they quickly have to figure out which one can be developed further and have a sound business model built around it. They have to ask themselves, which idea is the most feasible for us with the competences we have in our own team and in our network to continue with? It will be a very intense process. Fellows will have to develop their commercial skills on the one side and parallel to that they will have to work on prototyping their solution so they stand with a fairly good prototype at the end of the program.

What Then?
Fellows will be there with an idea and they know quite a bit about the marked. We will let it up to some of all the other Danish institutions like funds and investors we have, to bring the fellows further on with their projects. This counts for those fellows who want to continue with their projects. Because it’s not the sole goal of this program to create start-ups and start-up teams. It’s our hope that many will – but the purpose is also to get the competences they have achieved out in the broader innovation ecosystem in Denmark because there are so many angles from which you can do good innovation.

In September 2019 our first ever teams of fellows will onboard a 10 months journey with a steep learning curve.

But what do you learn when following the BioMedical Design NNF Fellowship Programme?

1)    You learn how to understand the basics of diseases and patient treatments and how hospitals work.

2)    You get to observe the daily work at a hospital ward and make a long list of needs – patient needs, staff needs, organizational needs…..

3)    You learn how to make a need statement – and to take your long list of needs from the hospital down to one need with a great potential for impact.

4)    You learn how to solve the need by making a prototype of a solution.

5)    You learn how to make a solid business plan for your invention.

And finally – you take all your learnings out in the real world as an entrepreneur, intrapreneur or use your skills in the company you work in.

What needs our fellows will find and which solutions will be invented – we don’t know yet – but they will have all the right tools and learnings to solve real problems and help both health professionals and patients with their inventions.

We can’t wait to take them on that learning journey!