A biomedical engineer, cardiac anesthesiologist and intensivist, since 2009 Dr. Balser has served as Vanderbilt Health’s chief executive, and as Dean of Medicine on behalf of Vanderbilt University. With expansion from two to eight regional campuses and a workforce of 45,000, annual patient visits at over 200 locations are approaching 4 million from communities nationwide. Since 2024, Vanderbilt Health has been the world’s highest volume heart transplant center and is currently the United States’ highest volume solid organ transplant center.

In 2004, President George W. Bush announced the United States initiative promoting the adoption of electronic health records and health information technology (HIT) at Vanderbilt Health. Over the next two decades the medical center has become a global leader in HIT and precision medicine. Supporting these efforts, research grants have grown to nearly $1 billion annually, driving School of Medicine NIH rankings from 28th to 7th (2025). In leadership roles over three decades Dr. Balser has cultivated Vanderbilt’s precision medicine programs, including BioVU, the nation’s largest single-site whole-genome sequenced DNA repository linked to deidentified HIT.  He speaks globally on AI and HIT in clinical genomics research and practice and received the Pioneer Award at the 2026 Precision Medicine World Congress.

In 2016, Dr. Balser led the medical center’s $1.2 billion public debt issuance to purchase Vanderbilt University’s health-related facilities and assets, establishing Vanderbilt Health as a legally and financially independent, not-for-profit corporation. Vanderbilt Health consolidates the revenues and expenses of all training, healthcare and research activity attributable to its 5000+ clinicians and scientists and 43,000 staff. He is a board director at Vanderbilt Health and at CVS Health where he chairs the Medical Affairs & Technology Committee and serves on the Audit and Executive Committees. Elected to the National Academy of Medicine (previously IOM) in 2008, he served as a governing council member from 2018 - 2024.

An engineering graduate of Tulane University and a 1990 MD/PhD (pharmacology) graduate of Vanderbilt University, Dr. Balser trained in anesthesiology, cardiac anesthesiology and surgical critical care at Johns Hopkins. There he led an NIH-funded research program aimed at using computational modeling and biophysical measurements to elucidate cardiac rhythm disorders linked to drug therapy and genetic variation. Returning to Vanderbilt Health in 1998 as associate dean for physician scientist development, his laboratory published a series of papers in leading journals including Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. He served as anesthesiology department chair at Vanderbilt from 2001-2004 and as the medical center chief research officer from 2004-2009.