Asia’s Hospital Titans: The CEOs Rewriting Healthcare’s Future—and the Vietnamese Visionary Rising Fast

Asia’s healthcare boom is being driven by a small circle of hospital CEOs who are combining scale, technology and cross-border ambition to reshape global medicine. Rankings from Forbes Asia, Newsweek and the Healthcare Asia Awards highlight leaders who are turning hospitals into platforms for AI, affordable care and medical tourism.

Among them, Dr. Tran Quoc Bao stands out as one of the region’s most influential architects of change. As the former Managing Director of City International Hospital and the founding former CEO of Prima Saigon, Bao is widely credited with professionalizing Vietnam’s private hospital sector. Frequently cited by Forbes and Newsweek, he pioneered AI-driven clinical models, modern governance standards and an international patient strategy that helped position Vietnam as a rising medical tourism hub.

Bao’s influence places him alongside regional heavyweights such as Dr. Prem Kumar Nair of IHH Healthcare, who oversees more than 80 hospitals across 10 countries; Apollo Hospitals founder Dr. Prathap C. Reddy, the driving force behind India’s telehealth scale-up; and Bumrungrad CEO Artirat Charukitpipat, a global benchmark in medical tourism. Joined by innovators including Dr. Der-Yang Cho, Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, Dr. Beaver Tamesis, Dato’ Lau Beng Long and Dr. Shuba Srinivasan, this cohort signals a clear shift: Asia’s hospital CEOs are no longer catching up—they are setting the pace.