Strategy
Vision
TUH develops citizen-centred, sustainable, and technological solutions for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care – benefiting individuals regardless of who they are or where they live.
Mission
TUH aims to be a health technology powerhouse comprising an intensive, integrated, and flexible collaboration between the Technical University of Denmark and the Capital Region of Denmark (soon to become the Region of Eastern Denmark), where health sciences and technical-natural sciences research and innovation merge to become a natural part of the development of all parts of the healthcare system—from logistics to diagnostics and the development of new treatments.
Ambition
The healthcare system faces a future with more patients and fewer staff. It is no longer possible to continue as before. Something different is needed to meet these needs and challenges, and here the combined expertise and professionalism of healthcare professionals and engineers can contribute to finding innovative solutions.
With the Technical University Hospital of Greater Copenhagen (TUH), the partners have entered into a strategic partnership aimed at making it much easier to jointly find solutions to the healthcare system’s challenges. TUH achieves this partly by removing significant barriers to collaboration, for example concerning career paths, data infrastructures and frameworks, innovation, and education. Additionally, TUH will work to increase the development of new collaborations withinhealth technology in the broadest sense. The partnership thus focuses on creating, facilitating, and integrating the meeting between technology and the clinical reality for hospital staff and patients - a meeting shaped by academic culture that can produce groundbreaking solutions.
TUH will work to establish physical facilities, share research infrastructure, and create an innovative and learning environment that supports interactions across different disciplines. The partners will establish physical satellites at each other’s locations and, in the long term, a shared physical innovation hub.
The partnership will develop large, joint, challenge-driven research and innovation projects (signature projects). Through an attractive and experimental interdisciplinary knowledge and education environment, TUH will foster an entrepreneurial research and innovation culture that unlocks the full potential. The partnership will create a strong, shared research and innovation environment that ranks among the very best nationally and internationally.
The life sciences industry is invited to participate in the development projects, contributing investment capacity and expertise to scale solutions that benefit individual patients, the overall healthcare system, and society at large.
The collaboration will develop, share, and implement knowledge about health technology, data infrastructure, logistics, and automation that prevent and improve patient pathways while simultaneously freeing up resources in the healthcare system.
Guiding principles
To move towards the shared vision, the board and the academy will work purposefully and focused on realising the following strategic guiding principles:
TUH must support the implementation of more health technology solutions.
Therefore, TUH must create structures, methods, and competencies to, in collaboration with other stakeholders including industry, accelerate the innovation process from needs identification and idea generation to implementation and scaling of health technology solutions in hospitals and the healthcare system in general.
DTU and the Capital Region of Denmark (and the upcoming Region of Eastern Denmark) will work as organisations towards even closer integration.
TUH will therefore help create flexible frameworks for joint appointments, allowing researchers from DTU to contribute to clinical practice and healthcare professionals from the hospitals to be affiliated with DTU in academic positions, thereby creating attractive career paths for non-medical academics working in hospitals.
Furthermore, TUH will work to remove barriers, streamline, and expand our existing research and innovation collaborations.
TUH shall support the healthcare system’s need for new solutions based on the partners’ strengths and an ambition for excellent research standards.
Therefore, TUH will, building on the mission work of Region H (soon to be Region East), develop TUH’s forthcoming research and innovation missions, focusing on both developing and implementing new sustainable and citizen-centred health technology solutions for all who need them.
The missions and their associated signature projects will be established with broad ownership from both parties, involving patients and preferably industry. It is a clear objective that TUH acts as a catalyst for strengthened collaboration with the life sciences industry, which is best positioned to disseminate and scale the developed solutions.
TUH shall systematically raise the technical-scientific competence level among healthcare professionals and educate more engineers specialising in health technology.
TUH will thus pave the way for more engineers in the healthcare sector, where students will receive a substantial part of their education through TUH. The selected TUH missions will help develop new study components.
Furthermore, TUH shall develop a concept for continuing education of healthcare professionals to enhance their competencies in innovation, co-creation with other disciplines, and utilisation of health technology solutions.
Solutions to the healthcare system’s needs and challenges will emerge from the meeting of healthcare professionals, engineers, students, researchers, industry, and patients. There is a need for physical meeting places that can create space for contact, facilitate matching needs with competencies, develop a strong culture of collaboration, and serve as a physical venue for cooperation. Virtual and physical meeting places across all DTU and regional locations and collaborative environments—including clinicians, researchers, students, patients, companies, and investors—can bring entirely new innovative potentials.
Furthermore, a large physical innovation hub is desired for TUH collaborations, including partnerships with other actors in the life sciences ecosystem. This hub is expected to be integrated into the development of Innovation District Copenhagen (IDC), ideally located centrally at Rigshospitalet. The hub will include shared meeting and working facilities, as well as simulation and laboratory facilities. It will be an open space where patients and relatives can also see and be involved in the work on innovative solutions.
For each of the five above guiding principles, action plans will be developed as illustrated in the figure below.
Download the 2025–2027 strategy here.
