“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.

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.

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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.

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. 

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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.

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.

– 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.”