Samsung Medical Center Ranks No. 1 in Korea in Newsweek's "World's Best Hospitals 2026"

Ranked 26th in the World
President Park Seungwoo: "Continuing the Challenge for a Healthy and Bright Future"

Samsung Medical Center ranked first in Korea in "World's Best Hospitals 2026," announced by the global current affairs weekly magazine Newsweek. Its global ranking was 26th, up four spots from the previous year.

The Newsweek hospital rankings were conducted jointly with the German research organization Statista. The final scores are calculated by weighting medical performance indicators at 40%, expert recommendations at 35%, patient satisfaction at 18.5%, and patient self-assessment tools at 6.5%.

Samsung Medical Center has continued to climb in the rankings over the past four years. It rose from 40th in 2023 to 34th in 2024, 30th in 2025, and reached 26th this year.

The hospital cited its focus on treating severe and high-difficulty diseases, as well as digital, innovation-driven care, as key performance drivers. A representative example is the establishment in 2013 of Korea's first Department of Critical Care Medicine and the introduction of a multidisciplinary critical care treatment system. More recently, it was designated by the Ministry of Health and Welfare as a base hospital for the "e-ICU Remote Intensive Care Unit Cooperative Network" project and is building a collaborative intensive care treatment system with regional hospitals.

Advanced treatment outcomes are also continuing. Notable achievements include the introduction of Korea's first CAR-T cell therapy, surpassing 2,000 cases of proton therapy for liver cancer, the introduction of Impella ventricular assist device procedures, and successful atrial fibrillation pulsed-field ablation (PFA).

Its research competitiveness is also being highlighted. Centered on the Future Medicine Research Institute, the hospital has built research platforms for precision medicine, regenerative medicine, and convergent medicine, and there are 15 faculty-founded startups. Among them, Aimed Bio, Encell, and Geninus have successfully gone public.

The hospital has also received international recognition for its digital healthcare capabilities. It achieved Stage 7, the highest level, in all four areas of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) certification framework in the United States: INFRAM, DIAM, EMRAM, and AMAM, and it recorded a perfect score of 400 points on the Digital Health Indicator (DHI). It has also built a Digital Twin-based Operations Control Center (DOCC), an operating system that links hospital resources in a virtual space.

Park Seungwoo, President of Samsung Medical Center, said, "This is the result of our future medicine achievements, centered on severe diseases, being recognized internationally," adding, "We will continue to drive medical innovation by transitioning into an advanced intelligent hospital."