a hospital · South KoreaAsan Medical Center

South Korea's largest hospital: 2,446 beds on 280,000 square metres at 88 Olympic-ro 43-gil in Songpa-gu, Seoul, established in June 1989 by Chung Ju-yung through the charitable Asan Foundation. It averages 11,377 outpatients a day, records 654,536 inpatients and 47,460 complex operations a year, and Newsweek has placed it 22nd in the world and first in Korea for seven consecutive years.

The hospital is a foundation's, not Hyundai's, though the founder is the same man. It opened in 1989 as Seoul Jungang Hospital and renamed itself Asan Medical Center in 2002.

Its numbers are the largest in this batch and they need separating. 11,377 is a DAILY average of outpatients. 654,536 is an annual count of inpatients — admissions, which means a patient admitted three times in a year is three. 47,460 is an annual count of operations described as highly sophisticated, which is the hospital's own category and not a standard one. None of the three is a count of people.

Inference — an outpatient department seeing eleven thousand people a day is the single most striking fact about East Asian tertiary medicine and the hardest for a visitor from a European system to picture. It is also why a foreign patient's experience of one of these hospitals is organised around an international centre that pulls them out of that flow.

The hospital reports an annual average of 19,482 international patients — which, unusually in this directory, is a named hospital's own count of its foreign caseload rather than a national arrivals total. It was first in Korea for organ transplantation on the national registry's 2012 figures, and its Asan Global Standard, introduced in 2011, was built on JCI's assessment principles.

Trade practice — the Korean route requires the hospital to be registered with the Ministry of Health and Welfare to treat foreign patients, and the work runs through an international healthcare centre that books, translates and bills. Transplantation and oncology carry the serious inbound traffic; Korea's cosmetic trade runs through a separate clinic sector entirely.

No price is published by the hospital.

As of 17 September 2026 the hospital states 2,446 beds, 11,377 average daily outpatients, 654,536 inpatients a year and 47,460 complex operations a year, with an annual average of 19,482 international patients. Newsweek placed it 22nd in the world and first in Korea for seven consecutive years to 2025. No price is published.