The hospital operates three branches in Saudi Arabia, located in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Madinah. In 2023 the group recorded approximately 1.9 million outpatient visits, an increase of 11% on the previous year, and more than 40,000 admissions across the three hospitals, an increase of 9%. Its corporate profile records 33,295 surgical procedures and 42,149 newly accepted patients in the same year. No later group wide totals have been published.
KFSH Riyadh serves as the primary facility. The branch covers an area of 1,000,000 m² and has a capacity of 1,519 beds. The campus is organised around centres of excellence covering organ transplantation, oncology, genomic medicine, neurosciences and cardiovascular care, and reports bed occupancy of 86.2%. In 2023, KFSH reported 1.9 million outpatient visits and an average patient stay of 8.8 days across its branches. In 2024 it treated international patients from 17 countries, 77% of them from other Gulf states, and reported a 47% increase in international patients over the year.
The Jeddah branch is a 537 bed hospital and serves the western region in Saudi Arabia. In 2025 it reported 132,368 outpatient visits within its core specialised services, an increase of 15.5% on 2024; 97,647 virtual clinic visits, up 12.1%; and 14,924 home healthcare visits, up 11.8%. It also reported reducing the time taken to decide on referrals to 21 hours, and introduced therapeutic plasma exchange as an outpatient service so that patients no longer require admission. In December 2024 the branch performed what KFSH described as the first fully robotic liver transplant in the country's western region, on a 23 year old man, in collaboration with the Riyadh liver transplant team.
The Madinah branch has a 400 bed capacity. It treats paediatric and adult oncology patients and also provides ophthalmology, obstetrics and gynaecology. In 2025 it delivered 23,443 chemotherapy sessions, increasing its treatment capacity by 27% on 2024, and reported a 20% year on year rise in patients accepted. The Saudi Press Agency reported 42,402 outpatient visits within core specialised services for the same year, including 20,754 oncology visits, 7,815 new patients and 4,934 surgical operations. A comprehensive radiotherapy centre is under development. In November 2024 the branch introduced a virtual pathology service which KFSH said reduced diagnostic turnaround from more than a week to a single day.
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Virtual care
The Virtual Care Centre, launched in 2021, is counted by KFSH as a fourth site alongside the three hospitals. It served approximately 180,000 patients in 2023 and delivered 293,381 virtual clinic visits in 2024, an increase of 58.2%, averaging more than 800 consultations a day. A round the clock emergency virtual clinic launched at the beginning of 2024 handled more than 23,500 consultations in its first year, about 2,000 patients a month. KFSH states that nearly 70% of its patients live outside Riyadh, Jeddah and Madinah; stable cases are managed virtually while urgent presentations are directed to the nearest emergency department, and prescriptions are posted to patients. A virtual pharmacy consultation service was added in 2024.
Patient flow and capacity
A Patient Flow and Capacity Command Centre, established in 2021 under the hospital's Centre for Healthcare Intelligence, uses real time monitoring and predictive analytics to forecast demand, detect delays in patient movement and alert staff. KFSH reported that it had made more than 170,000 interventions since its launch, reducing average bed waiting times from 32 hours to 6 hours and emergency waiting times by 14%. Separately, the hospital reported reducing the median time patients wait in the emergency department for an inpatient bed from more than 13 hours in 2023 to 3.2 hours by mid 2025, a reduction of 75%, attributing the improvement to direct admission pathways from outpatient clinics, earlier discharge rounds and faster discharge medication and diagnostics.
Organ transplantation
Since the establishment of the Organ Transplant Program in 1981, KFSH has performed up to 9,000 successful organ transplants. Additionally, more than 5,000 kidneys have been transplanted since the center's inception. Transplantation of the abdominal organs and lungs is managed by an Organ Transplant Centre of Excellence established in 2020, which covers kidney, liver, lung, pancreas and small bowel transplantation and has reported more than 6,600 transplants since 2011. Heart transplantation is run separately by the Heart Centre.
The lung transplant programme, established in 1998, is described by the hospital as the only one in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, with 268 transplants performed since 2000; the pancreas programme began in 2004 and has performed 56 transplants; and 16 bowel and multi-organ transplants have been performed since 2016. The Organ Transplant Centre of Excellence reported 882 transplants in 2024. Its paediatric activity that year included more than 100 liver, 80 kidney and two lung transplants, and KFSH states that its 80 paediatric kidney transplants were the highest annual volume reported worldwide.
The hospital operates a kidney paired donation programme, in which two or more incompatible donor and recipient pairs exchange kidneys so that each recipient receives a compatible organ. It reported reaching 500 such transplants in October 2024, performing ten paired transplants over two consecutive days in August 2025, and completing 130 in 2025 for a cumulative total of 691. KFSH stated that the 2025 figure exceeded the 94 performed by the highest volume single centre in the United States and the 73 performed across all 23 Canadian centres combined, and reported one year patient and graft survival of 97% to 99%. Women accounted for 62% of beneficiaries.
In August 2025 KFSH performed a heart transplant on a seven year old Saudi child using an organ from a brain dead donor in Abu Dhabi, coordinated between the Saudi Center for Organ Transplantation and the United Arab Emirates national donation programme. The centre runs a three year multi-organ transplant fellowship covering liver, kidney, pancreas and small bowel transplantation, and hosted an international consensus conference on minimally invasive transplantation in Riyadh in December 2024.
Research and education
The institute provides education and training programs, including postgraduate and undergraduate medical education in collaboration with universities in Saudi Arabia. It also operates a simulation center for training healthcare professionals.
KFSH collaborates with international and national institutions on research and education, including Johns Hopkins Medicine International, Alfaisal University, Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). With the Jameel Clinic at MIT, KFSH introduced Mirai, a deep learning mammography model that estimates breast cancer risk up to five years in advance, in Saudi Arabia in November 2023. A 2024 statement on strategic partnerships additionally names KAUST, the Saudi Space Agency, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Houston Methodist.
Research
KFSH's research arm is organised into departments including genetics, molecular oncology, cell biology, infection and immunity, biomedical physics, comparative medicine, and biostatistics and epidemiology, together with a cyclotron and radiopharmaceuticals unit and a research centre at the Jeddah campus. Research is overseen by a Research Advisory Council with standing committees for research ethics, clinical research, basic research and animal care. The hospital publishes the Annals of Saudi Medicine, ISSN 0256-4947 and indexed in MEDLINE, and in 2025 modernised a biobank designed to hold up to ten million biospecimens.
KFSH states that it maintains more than 2,400 active research projects with over 300 researchers and more than 100 international collaborations, and publishes upwards of 1,100 papers a year. Its 2023 annual research report records 1,151 indexed publications, 13 patent applications filed and six patents granted, of which one was a United States patent. The hospital reported 701 active research proposals at the end of 2024, an increase of 8%.
KFSH reported 35 of its scientists in the August 2025 Stanford University and Elsevier data update listing the most cited 2 percent of researchers worldwide.
Fowzan Alkuraya, founding chairman of the hospital's department of translational genomics and a recipient of the American Society of Human Genetics' Curt Stern Award in 2020, has been among its most cited researchers. He moved to a role in the Saudi biotechnology sector in 2024 while continuing to publish with the institution, and was elected to the American Society of Human Genetics board of directors for a term beginning in 2026. A 2025 Nature Genetics review he co-authored argued that the high rates of consanguinity and founder mutations in the Greater Middle East make the region an under-used resource for rare disease gene discovery.
In 2023 four biomedical experiments designed by KFSH researchers were carried out aboard the International Space Station during the Saudi human spaceflight mission, examining how immune cells respond to inflammation in microgravity and how gene expression changes over time. The results were published in Science Advances in 2026: the study reported that spaceflight altered molecular networks in a human monocyte cell model, affecting pathways associated with muscle and cardiac contraction, neuronal signalling and sensory perception, and reducing expression of DNA repair genes. The study was published by KFSH researchers with the Saudi astronaut Rayyanah Barnawi as a co-author. The hospital signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudi Space Agency on space medicine in 2025.
Clinical trials
KFSH established a Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative in 2021 to build what it describes as an integrated clinical research ecosystem. Its 2023 annual research report records 60 active interventional trials initiated that year. At the end of 2024 the hospital stated that it accounted for 52% of the 470 clinical studies then active in Saudi Arabia, and in September 2025 it reported 104 active trials with a further 80 studies being activated, representing 48% of the clinical trials newly registered nationally in the first half of that year. The two shares measure different things: the first counts studies active at a point in time, the second counts new registrations. Trials span cancer, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, dermatological and autoimmune, gastrointestinal and liver, and endocrine and metabolic disease.
The hospital conducts early phase studies, including the phase I trial of its locally manufactured CAR T-cell product, supported by apheresis and Good Manufacturing Practice facilities on site, and reported a one-time gene therapy restoring clotting function in eight patients with haemophilia.
Education and training
KFSH describes its education portfolio as comprising more than 200 specialised programmes accredited by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties. Separately, its diagnostic radiology, internal medicine and paediatrics programmes received initial accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education International effective July 2024, and KFSH became an ACGME-I sponsoring institution. Undergraduate medical education is delivered in partnership with Alfaisal University, alongside medical internships in Riyadh and Jeddah, nursing and allied health training, and continuing medical education.
In May 2025 KFSH graduated 334 physicians, comprising 191 from fellowship programmes, 120 residents and 23 from specialised health diplomas, which it described as the largest graduating class in its history. At the following ceremony in January 2026 it graduated 379 physicians, comprising 233 fellows, 124 residents and 22 clinical diploma graduates. The simulation centre, inaugurated in October 2020, contains four flexible simulation rooms, two clinics, two simulated patient rooms and four debriefing rooms, and uses three dimensional printing and virtual reality alongside surgical endoscopy and neurosurgical systems.
