Seoul National University Hospital and KT, South Korea’s biggest wired telecom operator, have signed a memorandum of understanding to stand up a single medical AI transformation platform covering everything from clinical care and nursing to research and hospital operations.
The deal, finalized August 17 at KT’s Gwanghwamun West Building in Seoul, targets the infrastructure gap that stalls most hospital AI rollouts. More than 549 medical AI products have won clinical approval across the country, but the tools still see patchy uptake in day-to-day hospital work.
KT points to analyses suggesting the majority of hospital AI pilots collapse before they ever scale, with commonly cited failure figures between 70 and 80 percent; Gartner traces most of those losses, 85 percent, back to data quality or infrastructure problems. Instead of adding still more point solutions, the carrier wants one shared AI and cloud foundation that many clinical tools can plug into, so no department has to stand up its own data pipeline.
Workstreams include point-of-care decision support that flags risk factors in real time, automation to ease nursing and administrative loads, and a Group-Integrated DX Platform that connects clinical AI experiments to a commercialization path.
At the signing, Kim Bong-kyun, KT’s enterprise executive vice president, described the hospital deal as the opening move of a bigger push: “Starting with our partnership with Seoul National University Hospital, we will build AI-based innovation models for the public medical market.”
