The purpose of this research was to understand the current status of hospital information system(HIS) in Korea. Our main interests were when hospitals adopted each component of HIS and how they developed and managed the system. Structured questionnaires were applied to the department of each hospital in charge of managing information system. All hospitals, 276 in 1997, were included, and among them 93.5% responded. The HIS has been rapidly developed to include medical record management system, order communication system, laboratory information system, and picture archiving and communication system. The software for HIS was developed extramurally in more than half of all hospitals, and usually hardware was secured by buying than leasing them. Recently more hospitals has separated departments for His as independent units in hospital.