a hospital · South KoreaSeverance Hospital

The oldest hospital in South Korea and part of the Yonsei University Health System: 2,437 beds in Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, seeing about 2.5 million outpatients and 840,000 inpatients a year. It was founded in 1885 by Horace Newton Allen as Gwanghyewon, the country's first western-style hospital, renamed for its American donor in 1904, and joined to Yonsei University in 1957. It was the first Korean hospital accredited by Joint Commission International, in 2007.

The 1885 date makes Severance the only hospital in this batch older than the countries most of its patients fly from, and the sequence of its names is a history of Korean medicine in three words: a royal hospital, an American donor's hospital, a national university's hospital.

It is a system rather than a building — Severance at Sinchon, Gangnam Severance, Yongin Severance, Wonju Severance Christian, and Songdo Severance under construction. The record pins Sinchon.

The volumes are the East Asian ones: 2.5 million outpatients a year and 840,000 inpatients. Both count attendances, not people. The robotic surgery programme reached twenty thousand operations by 2018, the first unit in the world to do so; the hospital reports about two thousand coronary artery operations and about thirteen hundred arrhythmia treatments a year.

Inference — a hospital that reports its unit volumes by operation is doing something the accreditation marks elsewhere in this batch do not: saying how often it does the thing. Volume is not outcome, and this directory does not read it as one, but it is a fact about the unit rather than about the building.

The 2007 JCI accreditation was the first in Korea, three years before the country's foreign-patient registration regime began in earnest, and it dates the start of Korean hospitals selling abroad.

Foreign patients reach it through the International Health Care Center, which states that an estimate of the cost of treatment can be provided on request before medical consent is given. Trade practice — that is the Korean shape: registration with the ministry, an in-hospital international centre, an estimate on request, and no published figure.

Nothing is priced on the public pages read for this record.

As of 17 September 2026 the hospital carries 2,437 beds, about 2.5 million outpatients and 840,000 inpatients a year. Its own overview names JCI accreditation without a year; the accreditor's own account dates the first award to 2007 and calls it Korea's first. No price is published.