What Happens if Tech Giants Run Hospitals: Learnings from Samsung

What happens when a global technology conglomerate takes charge of a hospital? Do doctors become engineers? Do robots replace surgeons? Or does the hospital itself transform into a data company?

In Seoul, one institution offers a glimpse of this future. Samsung Medical Center (SMC), founded in 1994 as part of the group’s social responsibility strategy, has become Samsung’s flagship hospital. By 1996 it was already designated as the White House’s official referral hospital in Asia, in recognition of its clinical excellence and patient-centred culture.

SMC is not a conventional hospital. It was conceived less as a medical facility than as a technology-life sciences platform. Its mission: to become a “Smart Hospital” for the 21st century. Unlike hospitals that merely adopt digital tools, SMC integrates technology into the very skeleton of its operations. Many of its senior managers come from Samsung Electronics, bringing with them product logic, systems thinking, and a focus on user experience. The result is a facility that acts as both a clinic and a prototype laboratory for the future of healthcare.

Three breakthroughs in “smart hospital”

1. Magic Cart: an unmanned logistics fleet
At SMC, medicines, blood samples, and supplies travel the wards not in nurses’ hands but in autonomous robots. The “Magic Cart” system can summon lifts, avoid crowds, and deliver items with near-perfect accuracy. According to Hospital Management Asia, the network has lifted delivery efficiency by 30%, cut labour costs, and virtually eliminated errors. Nurses spend more time with patients; doctors waste less time waiting for supplies. The hospital runs as smoothly as an automated factory or a major airport hub.

2. DOCC: a digital command centre
Most hospitals run on silos—separate systems for records, drugs, imaging, and administration. SMC collapsed these silos into DOCC (Data-based Operation and Communication Center), a digital “war room” that tracks everything from patient flows and theatre utilisation to MRI idle time. The system predicts surges, reallocates staff, and shortens queues. Official figures suggest inpatient scheduling efficiency has risen by over 40%, while emergency waiting times have fallen measurably. The hospital is orchestrated not by individuals “fire-fighting” but by data streams.

3. AI and robotics: human-machine collaboration
SMC deploys artificial intelligence across routine clinical tasks.

• Skinex analyses bedsores, classifying severity and recommending dressings, lightening nurses’ workloads.
• AI speech recognition now produces radiology reports, cutting error rates by 60%.
• Robots guide patients, deliver drugs, and even perform minimally invasive surgery. During the pandemic, robotic process automation enabled contactless issuance of medical certificates—an industry first.

These tools are powered by SMC’s vast data lake: over 4.5m patient records and its long-standing electronic medical record system (S-PIN). The hospital increasingly resembles an operating system for healthcare, with ambitions to extend into generative AI and “hospital-at-home” models.

My Reflection

Technology is reshaping hospitals at unprecedented speed. Where once medicine relied on doctors’ experience, nurses’ stamina, and patients’ patience, hospitals now move towards automated logistics, AI diagnostics, digital command centres, and smart wards. The result is faster care, more accurate diagnoses, and fairer distribution of resources.

Yet the transformation raises questions. As hospitals become more like factories and doctors more like programmers, will patients be reduced to abstract data points? Will efficiency crowd out empathy?

The lesson from Samsung is that a hospital can be as precise as a factory and as efficient as an airport. But it must also be as reassuring as a temple or a tree, as places where people find dignity and hope. Technology’s ultimate purpose is not a cold, flawless system, but a warmer, more humane world. That is the paradox of the “smart hospital,” and the direction healthcare must not lose sight of.

Reference

1. Smart hospital case study
https://gkc.himss.org/sites/hde/files/media/file/2024/10/02/smc-davies-award-case-study-intelligent-logistics-model.pdf 

2. Samsung Medical Centre's innovation pathway https://www.hospitalmanagementasia.com/tech-innovation/samsung-medical-centres-path-to-smart-healthcare/