Five tips for the medtech partnership

What will the new medtech partnership contribute?

The partnership is about strengthening and building on existing positions of strength and the already broad collaboration. Through our research and innovation, we will jointly identify opportunities and specific solutions to the many challenges facing the healthcare sector. Among other things, we must seek to utilise and target the potential of new technology, AI and robots to the needs of the healthcare sector. The solutions must benefit the patients, the healthcare sector and the companies that will be involved in business development and in scaling the solutions. Not only in Odense and Denmark, but also globally – all because we are stronger in partnership than we are individually.

What will this mean for our everyday lives?

Since the launch about a month and a half ago, together with OUH we are now in the process of organising, building relationships, participating in dialogue meetings at departments and planning activities and success criteria together with the steering group. The organisation is well underway, but so far only a few of us are experiencing a difference in our everyday routines.

However, I can now tell you that we will establish:

• A common organisational and management framework for the collaboration between SDU and OUH, so that we can smoothly lift and move tasks to support the collaboration.
• A number of research groups with researchers and experts from different areas. The groups will be involved in the work of building and qualifying medtech initiatives within their respective fields.
• A number of working groups with specialists from RIO, the faculties and OUH which will coordinate and run various work packages including analyses, funding, business development, business collaboration, communication, etc.

Can you reveal the first tasks in the MedTech Odense partnership?

2025 will be a year dedicated to establishing the partnership. But we have just had a steering committee meeting and we have been given a green light to, among other things:

• Develop principles for distributing medtech funding to promote research, collaboration and specific solutions. In 2025, we will distribute DKK 20 million of the joint ‘seed money’. We will initiate this in the New Year. DKK 20 million is also expected to be allocated in the following three years.
• Establish networking and knowledge-sharing activities in the medtech field.
• Develop a framework for entering partnerships with the ambition to establish the first business partnerships in 2025.
• Enter a dialogue on the construction and financing of the future MedTech Innovation House in Odense, which is expected to be ready within the next three to five years.

At the steering committee meeting, it was also decided that the medtech partnership will be known as MedTech Odense from now on. The name speaks directly to Odense's position as a nationally, and largely also internationally, recognised centre for robotics and innovation, where major robot conferences already take place and where our joint and future MedTech Innovation House will be housed and will be a hub for national and international collaboration.

The MedTech Odense partnership is thus far-reaching and invites strong and broad regional and national collaboration across hospitals, knowledge institutions, companies and commercial actors in general.

MedTech Odense is based at SDU RIO. What does this mean?

It means that the partnership builds on an organisation that we already have and are familiar with, which means we can get things up and running faster. That said, RIO is specialised in neither technology nor health. But on the other hand, we have both tasks and specialist competences in areas such as research-based innovation, research funding, business collaboration and collaboration agreements. In our everyday work, we therefore already work across SDU and in close collaboration with the academic environments, OUH and the region as well as external actors in the private and public sectors. As with all our other tasks and initiatives at SDU, we look forward to solving this new and exciting task in a continued good and close collaboration.

Where can I learn more about medtech?

In January, SUND will host the Health Innovation Day, which is the first major conference on medtech, in which many from the partnership and the academic environments will participate. This will be an important event that I am personally very much looking forward to.

If you are curious about specific solutions and the use of the latest technologies in the healthcare sector, I recommend that you keep an eye on sdu.dk. Here you'll find examples of what this means for the way we think about patient treatment in the future –- and of how SDU researchers, OUH healthcare professionals and companies are already working closely together on advanced robotic surgery and telemedicine systems for artificial intelligence in diagnostics and treatment.

See the examples at sdu.dk/healthtechnology/newslist

FACTS: Organisation of MedTech Odense

Day-to-day management: Søren E. Frandsen, Head of SDU RIO, is head of MedTech Odense in a shared management with Thomas Kristensen, Head of Innovation at OUH, who is deputy head.

The members of the steering committee are: Chair Bjarne Dahler-Eriksen (OUH), Kim Brixen (OUH), Ole Skøtt (SUND, SDU), Henrik Bindslev (TEK, SDU), Jeppe Kristensen (Region of Southern Denmark) and Helene Bækmark (Odense Municipality).

Søren E. Frandsen, Head of SDU RIO, is head of MedTech Odense.