an organization · South KoreaKorea Health Industry Development Institute
also: KHIDI · 한국보건산업진흥원
KHIDI. It is the institute that both promotes the trade and counts it, which is worth knowing before reading the count.
A government-affiliated institute under South Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare. It develops the health industry, runs the Medical Korea programme, maintains the registration database of institutions permitted to attract foreign patients, and compiles the annual national statistics on foreign patients treated in Korea.
The story Cited · khidi-medicalkorea
Korea did the thing almost no other destination did: it made attracting foreign patients a registered activity, and then counted the result at the level of the individual patient.
A hospital or clinic that wants to solicit foreign patients registers. A facilitator that wants to broker them registers. Registration produces a list of who is in the trade, and it produces returns, and the returns produce a national figure that counts people rather than visits.
That is the difference this record exists to record. The 2024 report published by the Ministry of Health and Welfare with KHIDI counts 1,170,467 foreign patients from 202 countries, and it is stated as unique patients excluding repeat visits, with 999,642 of them treated in Seoul. Inference — a number built from a compulsory registration and a stated counting rule is a different class of evidence from a market-research total, and it is the reason a Korean figure can be carried on this site while most national totals cannot.
How it works Cited · khidi-medicalkorea
Institutions register with the ministry through the system KHIDI manages; registered hospitals and registered facilitators are listed. Registered institutions report their foreign patient activity, KHIDI analyses it annually, and the ministry publishes the result. The counting rule — patients, not visits — is stated in the reporting.
Today Cited · khidi-medicalkorea
As of 16 September 2026 the most recent published year is 2024: 1,170,467 foreign patients from 202 countries, 85 per cent of them treated in Seoul, with national medical spending by those patients reported at 1.4 trillion won.
Notes
This record carries the Korean figure because its counting rule is published. It does not follow that the same number is comparable with any other country's; almost no other country counts this way.
The particulars
| kind | ministry, registry |
|---|---|
| iso2 | South Korea (KR) |
| status | open |
| region | East Asia |
| inbound patients year | 1,170,467 |
| about those numbers | The 2024 national figure published by the Ministry of Health and Welfare with KHIDI. It counts unique foreign patients treated in Korea, excluding repeat visits, from 202 countries; 999,642 of them were treated in Seoul. It is a count of patients, not of people who travelled to Korea specifically for treatment — a resident foreigner treated in Korea is inside it. (2024) · source |
| address | Cheongju, North Chungcheong, South Korea Cited · khidi-medicalkorea |
| where | 36.4800, 127.2890 (city) · OpenStreetMap · open in maps Inference |
| links | About KHIDI — Medical Korea |
| confidence | medium · needs verification · updated 2026-09-16 |
What it connects to
Pages that point here
Sources
- About KHIDI — Medical Korea — Korea Health Industry Development Institute · link (read 2026-09-16)
- Seoul Draws 1M International Medical Tourists in 2024 with ₩1.2T in Medical Spending — Seoul Metropolitan Government, 2026 · link (read 2026-09-16)
Where it came from: Cited a source named here · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Trade practice how the trade works, hedged · Inference this project's own reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.