a hospital · GermanyCharité International Patients

The international-patient arm of Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the joint medical faculty of the Free University and the Humboldt University and, at about 3,000 beds across four campuses, the largest university hospital in Europe. The arm itself is Charité Healthcare Services GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary that handles the administration for patients living outside Germany. This record pins Campus Charité Mitte.

Charité was founded in 1710 as a plague house outside the Berlin city wall and became a teaching hospital. It employs 18,217 people including 5,242 academic staff and 307 professors, teaches 9,485 students, and runs on a budget of 2.3 billion euro across Campus Charité Mitte, Campus Benjamin Franklin in Lichterfelde, Campus Virchow-Klinikum in Wedding and Campus Berlin-Buch.

The international arm is a separate company and that separation is the point. A German public university hospital cannot run a sales department; it can own a GmbH that arranges travel, translation and billing for patients its clinics have agreed to treat. Native speakers of English, Arabic and Russian staff it, and the office publishes its telephone hours — Monday to Friday, ten until two — rather than a brochure.

Inference — the German model inverts the Asian one. Bumrungrad publishes a knee replacement at a fixed price and admits the patient who buys it; Charité publishes no price at all, and the clinical decision on whether to accept a case is taken before any figure exists. One is a menu and the other is a referral.

No price, tariff or deposit schedule appears on the international pages read for this record.

Trade practice — the German route runs on records first: reports and imaging go to the relevant clinic, a specialist decides whether treatment is possible and what it would be, and only then does an administrative office put a figure on it. Payment from a self-funding patient abroad is settled in advance and reconciled after discharge against the actual bill, which is the general German practice for a patient outside the statutory insurance system.

What a patient from abroad buys at Charité is capacity that the German statutory system also uses, and every arrangement runs alongside a domestic queue rather than instead of one.

As of 17 September 2026 Charité states about 3,000 beds over four campuses, 18,217 employees, 5,242 academic staff, 307 professors and a 2.3 billion euro budget, and appears in Newsweek's 2026 list in the top 250. Charité Healthcare Services publishes what its office does and its telephone hours, and publishes no price.