By Dr. Jong Soo Choi, CTO, Samsung Medical Center
In an era when hospitals worldwide are racing toward digital maturity, Samsung Medical Center (SMC) stands as a blueprint for what a brilliant healthcare ecosystem can achieve. Long before “smart hospitals” became an industry buzzword, SMC had already envisioned a future where technology served as the silent engine behind patient-centered care. Its pioneering “4-less” philosophy — paper-less, film-less, chart-less, and wait-less — laid the foundation for one of the most transformative healthcare journeys of the modern era.
From achieving the world’s first HIMSS Stage 7 validations across four domains to earning a perfect HIMSS Digital Health Indicator score, SMC has not only redefined hospital efficiency but also humanized digital innovation.
Today, as the boundaries of care shift from hospitals to homes, SMC continues to push the envelope, melding AI, genomic intelligence, and lifelog data to redefine precision medicine.
In this exclusive interview, Dr. Jong Soo Choi reflects on the center’s three-decade evolution from digital pioneer to global thought leader, offering rare insights into how Korea’s healthcare transformation could shape the future of medicine. The conversation traverses the intersection of technology, empathy, and vision, revealing how SMC’s pursuit of smarter, more human healthcare is setting new global standards for the decade ahead.
1. Samsung Medical Center has been recognized for its advanced digital systems, such as DARWIN, RPA, and for achieving HIMSS Stage 7 validation. How do you envision the next phase of digital hospital transformation in Korea and beyond?
As of September 2025, Samsung Medical Center is ranked 15th in the “World’s Best Smart Hospitals” announced by Newsweek. When it was first announced in 2021, it ranked 31st, but it has risen in ranking every year, increasing its prominence. Being ranked high based on evaluations in various fields such as hospital information systems, electronic medical records, telemedicine, virtualization, artificial intelligence, and robotics means that it truly possesses advanced digital systems.
To evaluate this more objectively, we also take great pride in the fact that Samsung Medical Center was the world’s first hospital to achieve the highest level of maturity, Stage 7, in four areas – EMR, Digital Imaging, Analytics, and Infrastructure – through the HIMSS Maturity Model validations. Furthermore, in the pursuit of digital health, achieving a perfect score in the HIMSS DHI (Digital Health Indicator), which evaluates the overall framework from the perspectives of governance and workforce, interoperability, predictive analytics, and person-enabled health, also carries deep significance.
Samsung Medical Center opened in November 1994 in Seoul, South Korea. While driving various innovative activities, the hospital attracted people’s attention in many fields. The most notable area of focus (which may now seem like a matter of course, but was groundbreaking at the time) was the effort to lead change by utilizing Information Technology. The representative concept was the “4-less strategy.” The first was paperless, in which the main objective was to eliminate paper prescriptions through the hospital information system. The second was film-less, digitalizing the films produced by many medical devices. The third was chart-less, digitizing the medical records that grew thicker and thicker with each patient visit. Finally, there was wait-less, reflecting the reality that, upon visiting a hospital, patients stood in line to receive examination, for tests, and even to make payments. By leveraging mobile technology, which Samsung Medical Center excels at, the goal was to minimize patients’ waiting time. Can you believe that all this began 30 years ago?
Such activities can simply be viewed as digitalization, but at their core, they were pursued with the many transformations that digitalization could bring in mind. At the very center of this effort was the intention to enhance the experiences of patients and healthcare professionals.
The RPA (Robotic Processing Automation) mentioned in the question may seem to be a relatively simple technology. However, we applied this technology in an area that patients truly appreciate. Patients often visit hospitals to obtain copies of their medical records to submit to insurance companies for claims or to public offices for documentation. They had to request and wait at the medical record copy desk, and patients often wasted an entire day.
Looking closely at the process of issuing medical record copies, the steps are to select the type of record and the time period, print them, and issue the copy. We boldly opened this entire process to patients, enabling them to obtain copies from home through the website or mobile, and even to transmit or share them for their intended purposes with RPA support. This was possible by digitalizing medical records through the 4-less strategy and applying internet technologies. Considering the benefits that digital transformation can bring to patients, such a project cannot be ignored.
Digital transformation has also brought a new world to doctors treating patients. In the past, doctors attended rounds by searching paper charts and rewriting various test results on paper. Now, since all prescriptions and records are digitized, doctors simply check with their mobile devices before rounds, make notes of special matters, and particularly record professors’ comments to listen to them later and concentrate on patient care. In fact, an interview survey of doctors who recently experienced mobile-based rounds revealed that their round preparation time decreased by about 30 minutes each day.
For nurses, one area of change came from AI support in pressure ulcer management. Hospitalized patients often remain bedridden, and many suffer from pressure ulcers as a result. A wound care specialist nurse assesses the patient’s skin and provides care plans to general ward nurses. However, when there are many patients with ulcers to be assessed, care planning and nursing are delayed until the wound care specialist arrives. To address this, we trained a machine learning model with about 10,000 ulcer images, enabling general nurses – without waiting for the specialist – to assess ulcers with AI and coordinate with the charge nurse to begin treatment quickly. This brought meaningful changes.
Looking back over the past 30 years, the initial goal was digitalization centered on the 4-less strategy. But through upgrading systems every 10 years, we have steadfastly focused on patients in every context and pursued digital transformation based on the patient journey. That is why digital transformation has continued without pause until now. Regardless of what anyone says, this kind of patient-centered digital transformation has been like an inexhaustible spring, constantly motivating hospital staff to move forward, and thus it has been sustainable.
Based on my valuable experiences over the past 30 years, if I were asked to predict the next 10, 20, or 30 years, I would say without hesitation, and without reserve (something everyone likely knows already), three things: AI (Artificial Intelligence), the combination of genomic and lifelog data, and the shift of healthcare activities from the hospital to the home. I believe that AI, although already highly discussed, will become increasingly broad and profound in its application as time goes on. The most essential data for AI – clinical information – combined with genomic and lifelog data, will be increasingly advanced in use for healthcare decision-making, bringing enormous effectiveness. I also believe that much of healthcare service will move away from hospitals and instead take place at patients’ homes – the most comfortable environment for them – enhancing healthcare service outcomes even further.
2. You have championed the integration of clinical, genomic, and lifestyle data to advance precision medicine. What are some upcoming breakthroughs you see in making precision medicine more accessible to patients?
As genomic and lifelog data are added and utilized for healthcare decision-making, the level of sophistication will continue to advance, bringing significant utility. And in the healthcare field, the first major challenge to overcome is accumulating the clinical data generated in hospitals while treating patients, alongside genomic data and the lifelog data produced individually by patients. This is the first step toward pursuing precision medicine. The next step that must be advanced is building an infrastructure – a platform – that enables analysis and the gaining of insights by expanding the scope of imagination based on such data. Once data and an analytical infrastructure are in place, it is necessary to encourage the creation of a culture where clinical needs can be identified and addressed. At this point, the role of AI, which is greatly highlighted in our present age, becomes critical. This is because it plays a productive role by providing intelligent insights.
From my experience, integrating data and building a platform is not easy, but from an engineer’s point of view, it is still a relatively manageable process. However, even after creating this data – and platform-based playground, for clinicians who must actually make use of it, the field still feels unfamiliar. At this moment, the direction of digital transformation is required. For clinicians and researchers engaged in clinical and disease research, it is essential to build a culture where they can form consensus and take the lead, recognizing that with data and AI, they can develop new drugs or improve patient treatment protocols much more efficiently and quickly than before. A new approach is also required from an operational standpoint.
Lastly, consideration and review from a more macro perspective are also needed. The improvements to clinical practice and operations will soon bring about a new phase in patient care. Soon, there will be a continuous emergence of needs regarding which aspects of patient care must necessarily take place in hospitals, and which can now occur outside the hospital, at home, or in more comfortable environments. Ultimately, this will result in a shift toward methods of care with higher cost-effectiveness, laying the foundation for the era of “hospital at home” or “Care @ home.”
In summary, data, AI, platforms, and the active pursuit of digital transformation by healthcare professionals will, in the not-so-distant future, unfold a new era of precision medicine and Care @ home.
3. The Open Innovation Initiative with MIT, Brigham & Women’s, and other partners reflects Samsung’s commitment to global collaboration. How do such partnerships accelerate progress in digital health, and what global standards could emerge from them?
In fact, it may be difficult to say that I have expertise on this question. However, if we organize the factual context related to the question above, Samsung Electronics announced the “Open Innovation Initiative to Build a Digital Health Ecosystem” at the Samsung Developer Conference (SDC23) held in San Francisco in 2023, together with MIT Media Lab, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Tulane University School of Medicine, and Samsung Medical Center.
(Please refer to the link for more details.)
A detailed summary in table format is as follows:
In summary, Samsung Electronics utilizes the Galaxy Watch, and with the BioActive sensor embedded in the Galaxy Watch, collects and analyzes various biometric signals to develop personalized health management solutions across multiple areas such as heart health, sleep, and mental health. This is an open innovation initiative with global partners such as MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, demonstrating Samsung’s commitment to global collaboration. Such partnerships are expected to accelerate advancements in digital health by combining the cutting-edge research capabilities of each institution with Samsung’s technological expertise.
Based on this research, clinical data and genetic data are being integrated, and AI and big data analytics technologies are being applied to healthcare decision-making with increasing sophistication, which is expected to bring substantial benefits and drive healthcare service innovation.
In fact, (though I personally do not fully know the details), this process has a high possibility of creating new global standards such as wearable device utilization, data interoperability, and personalized management algorithms. Alternatively, it might be more important to secure interoperability and compatibility by making maximum use of existing internationally agreed global standards.
My personal opinion is that “global standards have largely already been defined by various international organizations (e.g., ISO, ITU, HL7), and it is practical to use these standards for interoperability in the wearable device and digital health fields. In fact, many standards established by international standard organizations such as ISO, IEEE, and ITU-T already exist in the wearable and digital health sectors, and many companies and institutions follow them to develop products and services. When large enterprises or innovation institutions such as Samsung develop new technologies and services, it is very important to utilize these internationally agreed global standards as much as possible to ensure interoperability and compatibility.”
Therefore, my personal view is that Samsung’s cooperation with global research institutions will rapidly realize digital health innovation and that making good use of already established medical technologies and standards that are globally recognized is more important. The way these standards are utilized will promote data sharing and collaboration among healthcare institutions worldwide, becoming a foundation for delivering more effective and innovative healthcare services.
4. Patient experience has been central to SMC’s “4-less” vision. From automating medical record issuance to smart hospital services, how do you measure and sustain patient-centered innovation?
I am not sure if this can be an exact answer to the question, but I obtained the Project Management Professional Certification from the Project Management Institute in 2003. To answer the question, one must first have knowledge and understanding of Project Management. The vision of “4-less” shows us the direction we should go, but it does not determine what exactly must be done.
Therefore, in Project Management, the key elements are the three factors of Scope, Time, and Cost regarding what needs to be accomplished. The first task is to identify the most urgent issue in the current situation. (What challenge exists, and what exactly is the problem?) Then, to solve that problem, it must be determined which people and departments need to participate. As you well know, in a hospital, problems cannot be solved by the role of only a single department. Therefore, defining the scope is not easy. And thus, the most difficult thing to establish is what will be done and for what purpose.
The automation of issuing medical record copies did not actually begin to solve a technical problem. Rather, it started from the prior need to ensure that medical record copies would be supplied on time so that patients could be discharged promptly. In a hospital, ensuring that patients are discharged quickly and on time is part of a virtuous cycle. If the discharge process is delayed, then subsequent processes, such as admissions and examination,s are also delayed in sequence, leading to longer lengths of stay and making the utilization of hospital resources, such as patient rooms and medical equipment less efficient. When such complex requirements are addressed by investing schedule and cost to complete the task, then a proper outcome can be defined, and the positive outcome can secure the sustainability of the project.
In 2013, the average length of stay at Samsung Medical Center was 7.3 days. By 2023, it had been shortened to 5.4 days. According to data released in 2024, in the United States, reducing the length of stay by one day can increase the margin by 4,500 USD. It may be difficult to say that the automation of medical record copies directly and solely contributed to this achievement.
However, the automation of medical records was not about solving a purely technical problem or about the maturity of the technology itself, but about addressing the essence of discharging patients on time. Rather, it was the result of an organizational culture – a movement toward wanting to change.
Additionally, the automation of issuing medical record copies increased patient satisfaction because patients no longer had to visit the hospital but could issue copies at home or via mobile. For staff, it eliminated the repetitive work of issuing copies, allowing them to return to their original duties of evaluating the quality of medical records, performing functions aligned with their licenses, and thereby increasing job satisfaction.
In conclusion, digital transformation did not stop at promoting technology-centered innovation, but by solving the essential work-related problems, it raised the satisfaction of both participating healthcare professionals and patients. Furthermore, reducing the length of stay also brought managerial benefits. Therefore, when promoting any digital transformation, it should not focus solely on resolving technology-oriented problems. Instead, if based on Project Management methodologies, with careful consideration of the project charter to pursue essential concepts and values, digital transformation can move beyond immediate problem-solving to bring about fundamental process changes and create additional value, thereby securing sustainability.
5. India is undergoing rapid digital health adoption with initiatives like the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. What parallels or opportunities for collaboration do you see between Samsung Medical Center’s digital journey and India’s healthcare ecosystem?
In terms of technological capability, I believe India has greater potential than Korea. Especially regarding the fact that India has the world’s largest population to benefit from technology.
The biggest current challenge – or perhaps what needs to be solved, or what will arise in the future – is that in order for technology to benefit all Indian citizens, there must be demand for that technology. I am not an economic expert, but if demand arises and people are willing to pay, then I believe many businesses can succeed sufficiently. For example, is early discharge from hospitals a cost-effective business model that reduces costs while providing the same level of healthcare action? If so, then many technologies will receive significant investment in either improving therapeutic effect or reducing cost. As demand and supply emerge and survive within that ecosystem, it will become a sustainable model.
However, before such market mechanisms operate, it takes a long time to expect free-will-based business activity from all citizens as economic agents, or if national competitiveness is not yet secured. In such cases, I believe and conclude that proactive business support or encouragement from the nation (government) is necessary, and in the long term, it will bring significant improvements.
6. Looking ahead, what is your broader vision for how AI, data, and digital health ecosystems will redefine healthcare delivery over the next decade?
I believe that human history is on an upward trajectory – continuous growth. I firmly believe that the future will be better than the past. Especially in healthcare, I believe that a future awaits us with distinctly different yet effective medical services, and we are steadily moving forward.
In a way, I think this cannot be fully explained in just one hour or one page of text, but many movies and novels have already portrayed scenarios where, upon waking up in the morning, your health status is revealed through your urine and stool analysis, and genetic testing predicts diseases so that preventive measures can be taken. Mayo Clinic and Mass General Brigham have begun administering cancer treatments patients at’ home rather than in hospitals. At Samsung Medical Center, robots transport necessary items to patients by their bedside at night instead of humans. The time taken for CT or MRI scans, which used to be one hour, is being reduced to half, and secure, stress-free health tests are being developed at health tubes near people’s homes rather than hospitals. In short, everything we can imagine is becoming reality in our future.
In summary, patient participation in their own treatment is becoming more active, and interaction with medical staff is increasingly data-driven, bringing a future of healthcare with more precise and profound insights step by step. Many treatments that were previously conducted in hospitals will be possible more comfortably at home – the place where patients feel calm and secure – enabling healthier and more meaningful lives.
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