New professor in Health Management

Professor Jens Otto Brunner joins DTU Management from the University of Augsburg, Germany. Jens Brunner’s area of work is within Decision Science in Health Care, not least the management in hospitals when resources are scarce. His professorship is funded jointly by Region Zealand, where his work is expected to bring great value as the Region is responsible for all hospitals in Zealand outside Greater Copenhagen.

The mismatch between increasing numbers of patients and a lack of resources seriously challenges the Danish healthcare system. It is, therefore, vital to make the most efficient use of available capacities in our healthcare system to offer high-quality treatment for patients while ensuring tolerable working conditions for physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals. Healthcare systems are highly complex multi-stakeholder production systems calling for advanced planning methodologies. Professor Brunner will be working on such planning methods at DTU Management, and he can draw on his research in Germany. For the past ten years, he has worked on improving the productivity of several parts of the German healthcare systems using methodologies from operations research, statistics and data science. He has done projects in logistic processes in hospitals, operation room scheduling, and personal scheduling for hospital personnel. Brunner has, for example, developed a forecasting tool for ICUs, which the Ministry of Health and Care in Germany used to make decisions about patient relocation, staff schedules, and capacity.

Professor Brunner is excited to join DTU Management and work on new and innovative research projects:

“I think DTU is one of the leading technical universities in Europe. Collaborating with engineers at DTU provides excellent opportunities for solving real-world problems in real-life settings that society can benefit from. With more colleagues working on similar problems, we will be able to tackle complex issues in healthcare operations in an effective and impactful way.”

Professor Allan Larsen, head of the Section for Operations Management at DTU Management, looks forward to working with Brunner:

“We are thrilled to have Jens Brunner join us at DTU Management in our ambition to build a centre of excellence for decision science in healthcare. Jens will work closely with the hospitals in Region Zealand, transferring methodologies and approaches from the German to the Danish healthcare system to benefit the Danish society.”

Director of Data and Development support, Region Zealand Henrik Ancher Sørensen is excited to welcome Professor Jens Brunner and looks forward to the close collaboration with DTU Management:

“We aim to build a center of excellence where research results with clinical and operational potentials can be implemented into the daily work of the Healthcare professionals. With this collaboration Region Zealand gains knowledge and skills, that can provide major contributions to the digital transformation of our Healthcare system.”