Atrium Health, Wake Forest Baptist Health and Wake Forest University announced Wednesday an agreement to build a joint medical school in the Charlotte region.

The combined organization would bring together Atrium Health’s clinical programs along with Wake Forest Baptist Health’s clinical leadership and research.

Wake Forest envisions a campus in Charlotte that would educate nearly 3,200 total health care learners, attract top medical education faculty and offer the largest post-graduate fellowship program for nurse practitioners and physician assistants in the nation.

In addition, the organizations would invest in a proposed Translational Research and Population Health Center in Winston-Salem.

The organizations agreed to start exclusive negotiations, with the goal of entering into a final agreement later this year.

Atrium Health is one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in the nation with nearly 14 million patient interactions each year across 42 hospitals and more than 900 locations.

Wake Forest Baptist Health is a nationally-ranked academic medical center and regional health care system with 2.2 million patient interactions each year across seven hospitals and more than 400 locations.

“Phenomenal things can happen when like-minded partners, committed to the same transformative vision, come together in new ways to better serve our patients and communities,” said Atrium CEO Eugene A. Woods in a statement.

The organizations hope to create a world-class health care system to improve health for all communities they serve and make care more accessible and affordable for the nearly 6.8 million residents near the systems’ service areas.

Wake Forest Baptist Health which works with the University’s School of Medicine. The Wake Forest medical school receives more than 10,700 applications for 145 doctor of medicine positions each year.

“This is an exciting prospect that will have positive state and national impacts in addition to benefitting the Charlotte and Winston-Salem communities,” said Nathan O. Hatch, president of Wake Forest University. “By strengthening medical education in Winston-Salem and bringing a medical school to Charlotte, we will open many doors for future health care leaders and also play a nationally leading role in research.”

Wake Forest School of Medicine is among the top U.S. academic medical centers, with more than $210 million in annual research funding from the National Institutes of Health and other external sources.

Together, the organizations would care for over 340,000 patients struggling with cardiovascular disease, and nearly 1.4 million North Carolinians in rural areas of the state and work toward growing scientific and analytics jobs in the Winston-Salem area.