Samsung Medical Center ranked fourth in Newsweek's assessment of the world's smart hospitals, climbing 11 spots from last year and posting the best result ever for a South Korean medical institution. It was the highest-ranked hospital outside the United States.
The hospital said on Oct. 22 that it placed fourth in Newsweek's "World's Best Smart Hospitals 2027." After ranking 18th in 2025 and 15th in 2026, it rose to fourth this year while holding the top spot in South Korea for a sixth consecutive year. Only three hospitals ranked higher: Mayo Clinic in first, Cleveland Clinic in second and Mount Sinai Hospital in third, all in the United States. MD Anderson Cancer Center, a leading U.S. cancer hospital, came in fifth.
The assessment covered seven areas, including digital information systems and infrastructure, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, and governance. Samsung Medical Center was named an "AI Innovation Leader," a designation that evaluates strategic adoption of AI and the capacity to put it into practice. It also received a perfect score of 5 for digital maturity. Among the top five hospitals, only Mayo Clinic and Samsung Medical Center earned perfect scores.
The hospital also achieved Stage 7, the highest grade, in four categories assessed by the U.S.-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), which measures the level of health care informatization. The categories are health care IT infrastructure, electronic medical records, digital imaging care and medical data analytics. In health care IT infrastructure and digital imaging care, it became the first hospital in the world to reach the highest grade.
The hospital is also moving quickly to build an AI-based medical system. In June it launched a dedicated AI organization called the AX Promotion Team, and it has developed and now operates its own conversational AI, SMC-GPT. The tool supports summarizing medical records, drafting documents and searching internal hospital guidelines. In the second half of this year, the hospital plans to introduce DAIA, an AI service that supports searching and analyzing electronic medical records, summarizing patient information and recording conversations between medical staff and patients.
Patient-centered digital medical services are also being expanded. The hospital is pursuing a system that uses biometric information collected from smart devices and symptom data entered directly by patients in the course of care. It is also broadening cooperation among medical institutions through S-CARENet, a platform that links appointment booking and remote consultations with local medical institutions.
"Now that the AI transition has become the defining issue of the era, the shape of future medicine will be more advanced than we currently expect," said Park Seung-woo, director of Samsung Medical Center. "We will keep innovating while upholding the value of patient-centered care, and share the future medicine we create with the world."