The NVKF sets course for appropriate medical technology
Clinical Physics in 2035
Why now?
Healthcare is under pressure from several directions at once: a growing and ageing population, a tightening workforce, rising costs, accelerating digitalisation, and — less commonly discussed — a geopolitical climate that makes supply chains and digital infrastructure less reliable than they used to be. Medical technology sits at the centre of all of these. It can help absorb demand, reduce the burden on staff, and improve outcomes. But it can also add complexity, cost, and risk when introduced without a clear sense of what value it actually delivers.
The Nederlandse Vereniging voor Klinische Fysica (NVKF) has responded to this landscape by setting out a deliberate course. Klinisch Fysicus 2035 defines where the clinical physics profession wants to be in a decade, and what it needs to do to get there. It builds on the Medisch Specialist 2035 vision published by the Federatie Medisch Specialisten in June 2025, and it translates those broader ambitions into something discipline-specific.
What is the document?
At its core, the vision commits to one mission: appropriate medical technology for every patient, now and in the future. “Appropriate” is doing a lot of work in that phrase. It does not mean most advanced. It does not mean maximally comprehensive. It means fit-for-purpose, proportionate, safe, and sustainable — which in practice calls for choices that the profession has not always been comfortable making. The document structures this course around four interlocking accents: valuable innovations, future knowledge and skills, technological resilience, and sustainable medical technology.
How was it made?
The vision emerged from a process of genuine breadth. Six roadshows across the country engaged more than half of the NVKF membership in conversation about the future of the field. Alongside those, the NVKF held consultations with the ministry of Health, Zorginstituut Nederland, patient organisations, hospital networks, insurers, and adjacent scientific societies. Writing groups worked up the input from these conversations into draft accents; a sounding board tested and challenged them; a core editorial team brought the pieces into a coherent whole. The result was adopted at the board meeting of May 2026.
Valuable innovations for the patient
The first accent addresses a tension that runs through all technology-intensive healthcare: more innovation does not automatically mean better care. The document is direct about this. Too many technologies are implemented that add little value, and too few are phased out when they stop contributing. The shift proposed here is from quality-for-its-own-sake toward value-driven and risk-stratified evaluation — across the full lifecycle, from procurement and introduction through to de-implementation.
This means clinical physicists taking a more active role in asking whether a technology adds value for patients, clinicians, and society, not only how to use it safely. New competencies are needed: health technology assessment, outcomes evaluation, health economics. The document calls for a NVKF knowledge agenda that reflects this, and for regional and national collaboration to prevent fragmentation — the same evaluation work done thirty times in thirty hospitals instead of once, well.
There is a useful provocation embedded here: the era of pursuing “the best possible technology for everyone” is giving way to “appropriate technology, responsibly deployed.” In a system under pressure from ageing populations, workforce shortages, and cost constraints, that shift is not a retreat. It is a precondition for keeping medical technology available at all.
Knowledge and skills of the future
The second accent addresses the profession’s competence infrastructure. Clinical physics sits at the intersection of physics, technology, and clinical care — which makes it well positioned for the transition ahead, but only if the knowledge base evolves in step with it.
The document does not try to predict exactly which technologies will dominate in 2035. (Wisely, perhaps — anyone who was certain about the specific trajectory of AI in clinical imaging three years ago has already been surprised twice.) Instead it calls for a flexible, modular approach to knowledge development: a shared professional base that all clinical physicists carry, with room for specialisation and life-long reorientation as the field moves.
On AI specifically, the vision is clear: by 2035, every clinical physicist should be able to assess AI applications for reliability, clinical value, and safety. Not to replace the data scientist or the algorithm developer, but to act as the bridge between technical capability and clinical context — the person who can ask the right questions and interpret the answers. That role already exists informally in many places; the vision formalises it. The NVKF Kennisplatform AI is already active in this space.
The structural vehicle is a strengthened network of NVKF knowledge platforms — functioning not as passive information hubs but as active catalysts for research translation, curriculum development, and professional signalling. What knowledge gaps exist right now? What should the training curriculum include that it currently does not? These are questions the platforms are meant to surface and answer continuously.
Technological resilience
The third accent is the one that gets least attention in ordinary times, and perhaps the most important one to have thought through before those times arrive.
Healthcare is deeply technology-dependent. The document acknowledges that this dependency is growing, and that the risks it carries are also growing: cyberattacks, energy grid failures, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical instability affecting critical components. The 72-hour autonomous functioning standard cited in the document — based on national crisis preparedness guidelines — is a concrete marker of what resilience actually means operationally.
For clinical physics, this means contributing to something beyond normal quality assurance: identifying critical technology dependencies, designing fallback procedures and back-up systems, and participating in realistic crisis exercises. It also means being prepared to make ethically difficult decisions in degraded conditions — accepting risks that would be unacceptable in normal circumstances, because “the best achievable” is not on the table.
The document calls for inter-hospital and regional collaboration on this, as well as alignment with national bodies including the ministries of Health and Defence and the national counterterrorism coordinator. That level of coordination reflects how serious the threat landscape has become. A hospital’s clinical physics department planning only for its own continuity is planning for the easy scenarios.
Sustainable medical technology for sustainable care
The fourth accent is sustainability — not as a compliance checkbox but as a genuine design parameter. The Dutch healthcare sector accounts for approximately 7% of national CO₂ emissions. Medical technology is a significant part of that footprint, through energy use, material consumption, and international supply chains.
The vision proposes integrating environmental impact into the full decision cycle for medical technology: selection, use, maintenance, and end-of-life. This does not mean refusing technologies because they consume energy; it means weighing their environmental costs alongside their clinical value and financial costs. It means designing for longevity rather than planned obsolescence, pursuing modular upgrades over wholesale replacement, and developing chain awareness — understanding where the materials come from and where they go. The NVKF Kennisplatform Duurzaamheid is already building this expertise within the profession.
The document is refreshingly honest about what “sustainable choice” does and does not mean in practice. It calls for distinguishing facts from myths, and for focusing on measures with significant effect rather than gestures. Not all apparent sustainability gains are real. The clinical physicist, with expertise in technology evaluation and quantitative reasoning, is well placed to make those distinctions.
Reading the whole
What makes this vision document interesting beyond the four accents is the underlying shift in professional identity it describes. Clinical physics has traditionally defined itself around physics expertise applied to specific technology domains — radiation oncology, diagnostic imaging, nuclear medicine. The Klinisch Fysicus 2035 vision describes something broader: a profession that holds hospital-wide responsibility for the quality and governance of medical technology, that reaches beyond the institution into community and home-based care, and that contributes actively to policy and societal debate.
That is a significant expansion of scope. The document is careful to note that this cannot happen through unlimited task expansion — it must happen through explicit prioritisation, sometimes stopping existing work to take on new work that adds more value. That is a discipline that requires both individual and organisational willingness to choose.
The result is a document worth reading — not only by clinical physicists, but by anyone thinking about how specialist professions in technical healthcare disciplines should position themselves in a decade that will test their adaptability in ways that are difficult to fully anticipate.