The Berlin Institute of Health (BIH)/Charité Virtual Research Environment (VRE) https://vre.charite.de is a GDPR-ready data management platform that enables medical researchers to store, find, access, analyze and share their data, including sensitive data, promoting FAIR data principles and reducing barriers to biomedical research and innovation.  The VRE is a module of the BIH Charité Health Data Platform systems (HDP), a component of the BIH Translational Hub Digital Medicine, and leverages that system’s generic big data infrastructure including its computing and storage resources.  The VRE is developed in collaboration with Charité Business Division IT (GB IT) and industry partner Indoc Research.

The VRE features a web-based researcher portal, a project-based and role-based access control and federated identity management system, a segregated Green Room zone to capture and pre-process sensitive data, analytics workbench tools for processing, analyzing, and visualizing datasets, automated ingestion of data from hospital-based data capture sources, a project-specific data warehouse for ingestion and query of structured datasets, a metadata repository and graph database for capture and query of metadata and lineage tracking, and support for ontologies and automated extraction and indexing of standard metadata fields to make data findable.