Julie Brooker, MD Janssen Denmark; Henning Langberg, CIO Rigshospitalet; Sven Dohmann, Country Director, J&J MedTech Denmark.

Collaboration is essential. If we want to affect real, lasting change to our healthcare and healthcare systems, it’s crucial that we work together with other organisations.

That’s why the new strategic partnership we’ve formed with Rigshospitalet is so exciting. Rigshospitalet is Denmark’s largest University Hospital; a world-class institution with a strong infrastructure – including labs, imaging, and biobank – and a recently completed Innovation Centre.

And they share our conviction that models of value-based healthcare and effective use of real-world evidence have great potential, both to improve outcomes for patients and to enable more efficient use of resources. Which, in turn, could make healthcare systems more sustainable and free-up investment for innovation.

So it’s great to set out on what we hope will be a long and fruitful relationship with Rigshospitalet, with the mutual purpose of finding evidence-based healthcare solutions that meet patients’ needs. And with such a range of involvement from our side, too.

Janssen EMEA and Janssen Denmark have worked closely together to establish this collaboration with Rigshospitalet, which will also encompass Johnson & Johnson MedTech. This is our first cross-sector strategic partnership where Janssen and J&J MedTech join forces on the co-creation of innovation in patient care.

Our joint research activities will initially focus on oncology and precision medicine, and we’ll look to expand into other therapy areas, such as haematology, as the collaboration progresses.

We believe that, in partnering with Rigshospitalet, the insights we can gather and solutions we can explore could improve the measurement and standardization of patient outcomes and experience, and – in so doing – help to enable more personalized models of healthcare.  

As my colleague Julie Brooker, Managing Director of Janssen Denmark, says: “Our drive at Janssen and Johnson & Johnson MedTech is to create transformative change in care, delivery and treatment, but no single company can do that alone – that’s why collaborations like this are so important.”

For Rigshospitalet, this partnership aligns with the Danish Government’s national life science strategy that was launched earlier this year, which highlights the necessity of public-private partnerships to support innovation and – among other things – make better use of health data.

Health data will be a central pillar of this collaboration, so I’ll leave the last word to our Janssen EMEA Head of Real World Evidence & Value-Based Healthcare, Clare Hague, who says: “I am delighted to see the partnership with Rigshospitalet come together, and I’m excited by the possibilities of being able to optimize patient outcomes and realize efficiencies in the health system, by working together in this way”.