Korean hospitals outpace global peers in digital maturity: pilot study

South Korean hospitals assessed in a pilot digital maturity study scored higher in the HIMSS Digital Health Indicator than global averages, according to a joint report by the Korea Health Industry Development Institute and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

Last year in April, KHIDI signed a memorandum of understanding with HIMSS on the Korea Digital Health Indicator (Ko-DHI), an initiative to assess the digital maturity of Korean hospitals.

The evaluations were conducted between April and December last year through the HIMSS DHI. Measuring digital maturity on a scale of 0 to 400, the DHI covers four domains: governance and workforce, interoperability, person-enabled health, and predictive analytics. Each domain is scored out of 100.

As part of this initiative, surveys, documentary evidence reviews, and interviews were conducted to "objectively and quantitatively" assess 10 hospitals selected by KHIDI, namely:

• Chonnam National University Hospital
• Chonnam National University Hwasun Hospital
• Chungnam National University Hospital
• Jeju National University Hospital
• Jeonbuk National University Hospital
• Kangwon National University Hospital
• Kyungpook National University Hospital
• National Health Insurance Service Ilsan Hospital
• Pusan National University Hospital
• Seoul National University Bundang Hospital

FINDINGS

The assessments, which were conducted between August and November 2025, showed that the 10 hospitals scored an average of 285 out of 400 on the DHI, placing them above both the 2020 global and Asia-Pacific (APAC) averages of 166 and 239, respectively. All but one institution surpassed the APAC average.

Among the DHI domains, the assessed hospitals demonstrated strong performance in governance and workforce (88%) and interoperability (86%). They also performed strongly in predictive analytics, scoring 78% compared to the global average of 37%.

A separate analysis combining findings from this 10-hospital pilot and prior DHI assessments of 12 major Korean hospitals found that Korean healthcare institutions perform significantly above global and Asia-Pacific averages across all domains. Governance and workforce emerged as a structural strength, while person-enabled health – covering patient-facing digital services and data sharing – was the least developed area.

This analysis also found that hospital size "did not consistently" translate into higher digital maturity, with several mid-sized hospitals achieving scores comparable to larger institutions. Meanwhile, general hospitals matched tertiary centres across most domains, with private hospitals recording slightly higher performance overall.

WHY IT MATTERS

As digital transformation has yet to be widely adopted among small, medium-sized, and regional healthcare institutions, KHIDI says that there is a "pressing need for a scalable national digital maturity framework" to systematically measure progress across healthcare institutions. This framework must also guide investments to improve care quality, efficiency, patient and clinician experience, and health equity.

The report, which is not publicly available, recommended expanding the Ko-DHI nationwide, alongside strengthening predictive analytics capabilities and patient-driven data sharing to support more continuous, data-enabled care delivery. It also called for increased investment in digital infrastructure in non-metropolitan regions.

The Ko-DHI initiative will move into a phased national rollout this year, extending assessments to more hospitals and conducting periodic re-measurements every one to two years to track the country's digital health progress and guide future policy development.

When asked if the government is preparing measures to encourage or mandate participation, particularly of small, regional hospitals, KHIDI said digital transformation support policies are already being deployed across regional, essential, and public healthcare.

"We believe the digital maturity assessment framework can spread to all medical institutions in Korea when such policy planning is adopted; therefore, we do not have plans for separate support or participation incentive measures at this time," Lee Kwan-Ik, director and chief researcher of the Bureau of Bio Health Innovation at KHIDI, told Healthcare IT News.

Lee also said that the Korean government may be expected to craft support policies to meet pressing tasks  – such as digital infrastructure, data utilisation environments, and conditions for introducing digital technology in clinical settings – resulting from the digital maturity assessments.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

The Korean government previously assessed the digital maturity of the country’s healthcare system through official surveys, including the "Survey on the Status of Information Technology in Domestic Medical Institutions" and the "Fact-finding Survey on Health and Medical Information."

Those surveys, according to Lee, focused on infrastructure construction, such as individual medical information systems, EMR installation, and personal information protection status.

"However, these fragmented surveys could not capture the actual results and efforts of digital transformation, nor could they determine where Korea's [digital maturity] level stood," Lee explained to this publication.

Those surveys, with their limitations in helping the country properly gauge the health system's digital maturity and set future directions for innovation, have not been conducted since the pandemic.

HIMSS is the parent company of HIMSS Media, which publishes Healthcare IT News.