a hospital · South KoreaSamsung Medical Center

A 1,766-bed hospital in Gangnam, Seoul, opened on 9 November 1994 and run by the Samsung Life Public Welfare Foundation. It employs 7,929 people including 915 physicians and 3,337 nurses, and has been the teaching hospital of the Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine since 1997.

The hospital is a corporate foundation's, not a company's, and it arrived late — 1994, decades after Severance and five years after Asan. What it built instead of history was systems: it holds Stage 7 validation, the top level, across all four HIMSS digital maturity models and took a 2024 Davies Award for the use of that record system.

Inference — that is an unusual thing for a hospital to lead with, and it is the Korean pattern. The three Seoul hospitals in this directory compete on measurement and on rank rather than on price, and none of them publishes one.

Its major clinical institutes are the Samsung Comprehensive Cancer Center, opened 2008, and the Heart Vascular Stroke Institute, opened 2014.

The hospital is also known for a failure. It was the centre of South Korea's 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak and was criticised over its handling of it — a reminder that an outbreak inside a hospital is a hazard of hospitals, including large ones with good systems, and that this directory reports it the same way anywhere.

Korea regulates foreign-patient work directly: a facility must register with the Ministry of Health and Welfare to treat foreign patients, and the ministry publishes the national count. It reported 1.17 million foreign patients for 2024, which counts registered treatment episodes across every registered provider from a university hospital to a skin clinic.

Trade practice — the Korean route for a foreign patient runs through an international healthcare centre inside the hospital, and the hospital must be registered with the ministry to run one. Screening and oncology carry most of the serious inbound work; cosmetic and dermatological work runs through a separate and far larger clinic sector in the same districts.

No price is published by the hospital.

As of 17 September 2026 the hospital carries 1,766 beds and 7,929 employees including 915 physicians and 3,337 nurses, on the figures published as of 31 December 2024. It holds HIMSS Stage 7 across DIAM, EMRAM and INFRAM and a 2024 Davies Award. No price and no foreign patient count of its own is published.