Leaders from Nashville and Berlin shared their expertise throughout the event. (photo by Charité, M. Kashiwabara)
In late 2025, Vanderbilt Health signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin — one of Europe’s top university hospitals — with the goal of increasing collaboration in medical education, clinical research, digital health and translational science.
Less than a year later, the formalized partnership is already more than words on paper. A successful symposium — “From EHR to Impact: Unlocking the Full Potential of Clinical Data” — was held in Berlin this summer. It brought together top leaders and experts from both institutions to explore how clinical data can be translated into meaningful impact through digital tools such as the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system and artificial intelligence.
“We envisioned the partnership between Vanderbilt and Charité would be powerful, but to see this collaboration already yielding dividends is incredibly gratifying,” said Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, President and CEO of Vanderbilt Health and Dean of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “As we had envisioned, we are working together to turn ideas into action to improve our health systems and are deeply grateful to our colleagues in Berlin.
“In just one year, our signed agreement has transformed into growing personal relationships, foundational work for future scientific studies, and the initial development of training programs that will advance our shared missions.”
Having key leaders from Vanderbilt and Charité in attendance at the summer symposium was “a reaffirmation of this being important from the highest levels,” said Donald Brady, MD, Executive Vice President for Educational and Medical Staff Affairs at Vanderbilt Health and Executive Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at VUSM.
“It was exciting to identify the strengths of both institutions and where they can complement some of the goals each institution has — goals that can be more easily realized because of the strengths of the other,” Brady added. “It’s very clear that the partnership will take both institutions to the next level.”
During the symposium, a 10-member delegation of top leaders from Vanderbilt Health shared their thoughts on several topics, including lessons learned from launching Epic at Vanderbilt Health, conducting randomized trials using pic-enabled EHR workflows, and building a genomic learning health system for precision medicine. Leaders from both institutions participated in panel discussions.
“Implementing a new electronic health record system is an extraordinarily complex undertaking,” said Heyo K. Kroemer, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of Charité, in his opening remarks. “Having a partner institution like Vanderbilt by our side — one that is willing to share its experience in leveraging clinical data and digital infrastructure and engage in an open, trusted exchange — is therefore of tremendous value.
“For Charité, this collaboration provides important guidance on how to successfully navigate such a far-reaching transformation in the face of demographic change, structural pressures and financial challenges within the health care system. Strategic international partnerships like this one help us develop practical solutions to the challenges of tomorrow’s medicine and are therefore a cornerstone of our internationalization strategy.”
A key lesson from the symposium was that a digital transformation project such as the launch of a new EHR system is “not just an IT project, it’s an institution-wide change project,” said Martin Kreis, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Charité.
“Successful implementation requires clear governance structures, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the early involvement of all professional groups,” he said. “Only when processes are designed together can new technologies reach their full potential and create lasting benefits for both patient care and research.”
Collaborative, pilot projects funded by Stiftung Charité
In addition to the successful summer symposium, eight pilot projects in partnership with Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin — seven with Vanderbilt Health and one with Vanderbilt University School of Nursing — have been funded by Stiftung Charité.
The Stiftung Charité is an independent, private, nonprofit foundation established by German entrepreneur Johanna Quandt to promote Berlin as a leading global center for the life sciences. The foundation primarily supports Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, alongside other partner life science institutions in Berlin. The funding, provided in support of Charité’s new Profile Partnerships Program, enables strategically selected international collaborations in research, teaching and patient care with partner institutions in Sweden, the United States and India.
“What’s been exciting to see is all of this come together in a way that then builds towards this next level and this next chapter of robust trans-Atlantic collaboration that can answer important health questions and drive innovations in research, clinical practice, teaching and learning,” said Marie Martin, PhD, MEd, Associate Vice President of Global Health for Vanderbilt Health and Assistant Dean of Global Health Education for Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “These are things that would be difficult to do as single institutions. But together, it’s possible. The addition of this foundation funding comes at a perfect time to support these early ideas and pilot projects that we feel confident will expand.”
Julie Bastarache, MD, Associate Professor in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine, has been collaborating with colleagues from Charité for more than a decade, co-investigating acute lung injury during critical illness. When she learned about the Charité-Vanderbilt MoU, she was excited and offered her assistance in further developing connections with pulmonary experts in Berlin.
“The other area that Charité and Vanderbilt are really already collaborating in is the cardiology space,” Bastarache said. “So, I met with Evan [Brittain] and asked if he would be interested in studying the intersection between a specific type of heart failure and acute lung injury. There’s not much literature on this, and the combined expertise here and at Charite was just perfect to put this program together. So, it was serendipity and a lot of great people being willing to embark on this giant project.”
Evan Brittain, MD, MSCI, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine, quickly agreed.
“We have sought funding to partner with Charité in a couple of ways,” Brittain said. “One is to support the research that we’re doing. We want each site to be able to do specific scientific methods in the same way. We’ve got funding to send one of our junior investigators over to Berlin to spend time in their lab and learn how to do a technique that is unique to that environment. They will learn that and then bring it back.
“We’re doing the same thing in two different labs internationally, which makes the science more rigorous. And we’ll do the same thing for another project where we’ll have other individuals come over and learn how to do something that Julie developed that’s unique to Vanderbilt’s ICU. This will promote not just the partnership; it will make our science stronger as well.”
Bastarache and Brittain also have plans to collaborate with Charité colleagues on a career development workshop to share best practices, as well as a scholar exchange program.
“Physician-scientist development is very different in Germany and the U.S., so part of the workshop will be just sharing what we do in each of our institutions,” Bastarache said. “We hope to learn from each other. We would also love to establish a scholar exchange program where scholars from each institution do a mini sabbatical — maybe go for a couple of months. We would love to develop a real mechanism to allow particularly early-career faculty to train at each of the institutions and learn specific techniques.
“We’d also like to highlight successful, early-career physician-scientists. We envision having someone from Vanderbilt who’s been successful and has benefited from the institutional support here go over and give a talk, and then likewise a successful, early-career member from Charité come give a talk here. We’re going to pursue funding for this and are tentatively thinking this can be during the spring/summer next year.”
Charité Profile Partnership Flexible Fund projects include:
- VERTEX: Vanderbilt–Charité exchange on clinical repositories and translational excellence: Exploring Epic-based CDSS pilots across two leading academic medical centers, with principal investigators (PIs) Felix Balzer, MD, PhD, (Charité), and Josh Peterson, MD, MPH, and Adam Wright, PhD (Vanderbilt Health)
- Strengthening professional nursing practice, with PIs Sarah Goldsteen, MHSc (Charité), and Ruth Kleinpell, PhD, ACNP-BC (Vanderbilt University School of Nursing)
- Building Responsible International Data Governance for Exchange (BRIDGE): A trans-Atlantic assessment of synthetic data sharing, with Fabian Prasser, PhD (Charité), and Bradley Malin, PhD (Vanderbilt Health)
- From digital health to learning health systems: Advancing the Vanderbilt-Charité Profile Partnership through clinical implementation science #IntStrat2030, with PIs Akira-Sebastian Poncette, MD (Charité), and Chrissie Schaeffer, DNP, APRN, and Sunil Kripalani, MD, MSc (Vanderbilt Health)
- Acquisition of heat-moisture exchanger filter fluid isolation and analysis capability at Vanderbilt University to advance lung research at Charité, with PIs Lasti Erfinanda, PhD (Charité), and Julie Bastarache, MD (Vanderbilt Health)
- Vanderbilt Health/Charité training in aortic banding technique, with PIs Mariya Kucherenko, PhD (Charité), and Vineet Agrawal, MD, PhD (Vanderbilt Health)
- Multimodal predictors of ECT response: Integrating neuroimaging and digital phenotyping, with PIs Merve Fritsch, MD (Charité), and Stephan Heckers, MD, MSc; Joshua Smith, MD; and Timothy Adegoke, MD (Vanderbilt Health)
- Patient flow and capacity operations collaborative, with PIs Benjamin O’Brien, MD (Charité), and Stephan Russ, MD (Vanderbilt Health)
