HKUST School of Medicine (in preparation) (Part 1) – The bid contest, differentiated positioning, and curriculum framework

On 18 November 2025, the Executive Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region formally approved The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) to establish Hong Kong’s third medical school^※, making HKUST the third university in Hong Kong with medical-degree-awarding capability, after the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (founded 1887) and the Faculty of Medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (founded 1981). In a tripartite contest lasting roughly eight months, involving HKUST, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), and Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), HKUST prevailed on the strength of four factors: a sharply defined strategic positioning, a broad global outlook, deep integration of medical and research strengths, and robust financial capacity. This article (Part 1) examines the details of that bid contest, HKUST’s differentiated positioning as a “tech-driven” medical school, and the structure of its four-year MBBS programme. For the appointment of the founding dean, the groundbreaking ceremony for the Medical Education and Research Complex, and the long-term Ngau Tam Mei campus plan, see HKUST School of Medicine (in preparation) (Part 2)^※.

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# 1. Why a third medical school? How large is Hong Kong’s healthcare manpower gap?

Hong Kong’s public healthcare system has long been under structural pressure from a severe shortage of doctors. In his October 2024 Policy Address, Chief Executive John Lee pledged to expand local healthcare professional training to address the shortfall^※ and announced the launch of a recruitment process for a third medical school. Hong Kong’s two existing medical schools—the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (established 1887) and the Faculty of Medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (established 1981)^※—both offer six-year direct-entry undergraduate programmes, together training about 540 medical students each year, far short of the healthcare system’s actual needs. The government therefore decided to select the host institution for the third medical school through an open bidding process and established a Task Group on the Establishment of the New Medical School in October 2024, responsible for setting criteria and reviewing proposals.

The specific scale of Hong Kong’s healthcare manpower shortfall was subsequently confirmed with greater precision in an updated official projection. The Healthcare Manpower Projection 2023, commissioned by the Health Bureau and compiled by the Hospital Authority, was submitted to the Legislative Council Panel on Health Services on 7 June 2024. The projection showed that the shortage of doctors would peak at 1,570 in 2030, then gradually narrow but still stand at 940 by 2045; the shortage of general nurses was even more acute, reaching 9,500 in 2030 (about 17.1% of demand) and still 4,200 in 2045^※. The report also noted that the supply of dentists would reach a “turning point” from 2040 onwards—with supply beginning to exceed demand, thanks largely to increases in locally funded training places in preceding years. This finding indirectly validated the policy path of “expanding local medical training” and provided the data underpinning for the later establishment of a third medical school.

Source: Health Bureau, Healthcare Manpower Projection 2023, 7 June 2024^※.

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# 2. What did the three universities propose?

On 17 March 2025, HKUST, PolyU, and HKBU submitted their proposals to the Task Group on the Establishment of the New Medical School on the same day^※. The contest became a rare three-way tussle in the history of Hong Kong higher education.

HKUST’s proposal centred on a differentiated positioning of “tech-driven medicine.” Its 150-page proposal covered five major areas: innovative strategic positioning, curriculum design and staffing, clinical placements and learning resources, student admissions arrangements, and a sustainable financing model^※. It emphasised embedding artificial intelligence, data science, and robotics directly into clinical training, aiming to cultivate “doctor-scientists who understand technology.” HKUST also pre-emptively signed over 20 collaboration agreements with top-tier medical institutions in Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, the United Kingdom, and the United States, demonstrating to the assessors that an international clinical network was already taking shape.

PolyU’s proposal was built around “greatest cost-effectiveness” and an existing foundation of “engineering-medicine integration.” PolyU highlighted its 45-year history of healthcare education, 50,000 healthcare-related alumni, and over 90 specialist laboratories and clinical facilities in fields such as medical imaging, radiotherapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and nursing^※. It pledged to bear all financial costs itself before relocating to the Northern Metropolis. PolyU’s proposal enlisted an advisory board led by Chinese Academy of Engineering academician Zhong Nanshan and Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine (2005) Barry Marshall; 16 of the 21 board members headed prominent medical schools in mainland China. It is worth noting that “AI-empowered healthcare” was not a narrative unique to HKUST in this bid. PolyU President Teng Jin-guang, in an interview prior to the proposal submission, likewise argued that the third medical school should be oriented towards a “future AI-empowered healthcare ecosystem,” envisaging a student-centred teaching model accompanied by AI and robotic medical teaching systems such as virtual hospitals and virtual surgery^※. In other words, both universities wrote AI into their proposals; the real distinction lay more in the nature of their “existing base” and self-funding capacity (see Section 5, “Why did HKUST win?”).

HKBU’s proposal took “integration of Chinese and Western medicine” as its core competitive edge. Leveraging its long-established School of Chinese Medicine and its unique position as the commissioned operator of Hong Kong’s first Chinese Medicine Hospital (set to open in December 2025), HKBU proposed an innovative curricular pathway that “gives equal weight to Eastern and Western medicine”^※, aiming to deeply integrate Western clinical training with traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis and treatment.

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# 3. Were there voices of doubt during the bidding stage?

One-line conclusion: Nearly a year and a half before the formal proposal submission, a legislator from the medical sector had publicly questioned whether a single new medical school could solve the doctor shortage in the short term; at that point HKUST had also not yet disclosed its teaching hospital collaboration arrangements—gaps that were gradually filled only later.

HKUST first disclosed its preliminary idea of establishing a medical school to the media in October 2023, about two years before its eventual win in November 2025. The bidding process was not entirely without controversy. Legislative Councillor for the medical functional constituency, Dr. David Lam Tzit-yuen (a surgeon by training), stated publicly at the time that “relying on this medical school to solve Hong Kong’s doctor shortage in the short term is unrealistic; in the long term, perhaps”^※, and pointed out that when HKUST first floated the idea, it had not yet announced concrete arrangements for teaching hospital partners—clinical placement arrangements being an important element among the ten assessment criteria (see also HKUST wins Hong Kong’s “third medical school” (November 2025)^※).

This gap was later filled progressively: in March 2025, HKUST signed clinical collaboration agreements with Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital and Adventist Hospital (see Section 5, “Why did HKUST win?” and our Part 2^※), and subsequently expanded this to over 40 international and mainland clinical collaboration agreements. Judging from the timeline, these early criticisms and the subsequent flurry of partnership signings almost echoed each other; to some extent this represented HKUST’s substantive response to the doubts, rather than remaining at the level of the written proposal alone.

This also explains why the government placed the final accreditation authority for the medical programme in the hands of the Medical Council of Hong Kong, which operates independently of the administrative process—the Executive Council’s approval in November 2025 merely answered the question of “who should run it”; whether the school can actually produce qualified doctors still has to pass the twin tests of accreditation and construction. Administrative approval and professional accreditation are two separate hurdles.

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# 4. How long did the review take? What criteria did the Task Group use?

The Task Group spent about eight months reviewing the three proposals. The review framework comprised ten main criteria, covering innovative strategic positioning; differentiation from the existing two medical schools; capacity to recruit high-calibre international faculty; plans for a modern campus and advanced teaching facilities; arrangements for clinical teaching hospitals and collaboration with healthcare institutions in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area; curriculum structure and competency-based assessment methods; and financial sustainability. During the review period, the Task Group held meetings with the three universities in stages and conducted in-depth questioning of each proposal. The entire bidding cycle—from the submission of proposals in March 2025 to the approval on 18 November 2025—lasted roughly eight months.

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# 5. Why did HKUST win? What reasons did officials give?

When announcing the result, Secretary for Health Lo Chung-mau noted that HKUST was most outstanding on “innovative strategic positioning,” stressing that its “strategic positioning is very clear and its global vision is very broad,” and that it would enjoy certain advantages in recruiting faculty and students, as well as a clear edge in research^※. Lo summarised HKUST’s core winning strengths as fourfold: sharply defined strategic positioning, deep integration of medicine and research and development, a broad global outlook, and relatively strong financial resources.

The table below summarises the main differences between the proposals of the three universities:

The responses from PolyU and HKBU to their loss were relatively measured: PolyU issued a statement saying it was “disappointed not to be selected to establish the third medical school, but fully respects the Government’s decision”^※, with President Teng Jin-guang citing the saying “failure is the mother of success”; HKBU had Council Chairman Dr. Wilfred Wong Ying-wai convey the university’s congratulations to HKUST on its behalf^※, while President Professor Alexander Wai Ping-kong stated that HKBU would remain committed to biomedical research, healthcare professional training, and clinical services, and would dedicate full effort to operating Hong Kong’s first Chinese Medicine Hospital.

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# 6. Where does the HKUST School of Medicine’s differentiated positioning of “tech-driven medicine” come from?

The most central element of the HKUST School of Medicine’s differentiated positioning is its “tech-driven” orientation. According to HKUST, the new school will fully leverage the university’s strengths in data science, artificial intelligence, and robotics, embedding these technologies directly into clinical training^※. This positioning is by no means empty rhetoric; it is built on HKUST’s existing hard strengths:

• AI pillar — The von Neumann Institute (VNI), established in 2025, explicitly designated “healthcare” as one of the key focus areas of its AI research (see Robotics and Artificial Intelligence^※), providing a technological pillar for the medical school;
• Neuroscience track record — HKUST’s State Key Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience has achieved landmark results in areas such as blood-based diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (see Key Laboratories and Research Institutes (Part 1)^※, Landmark Discoveries and Signature Research Areas^※), laying a foundation for the school’s neuroscience direction;
• Robotics capability — The medical/surgical robotics capability of the Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute can interface with clinical training and research (see Robotics and Artificial Intelligence^※).

In other words, the logic behind HKUST establishing a medical school is not to compete head-on with HKU and CUHK in traditional clinical medicine, but to forge a differentiated “technology + medicine” path — combining its already leading AI, data science, and robotics capabilities with brand-new medical education to cultivate “doctors who understand technology.” In terms of institutional narrative, this is entirely consistent with HKUST’s consistent ethos of “not replicating, but creating”: since it is Hong Kong’s third medical school, it will not repeat the models of the first two, but carve out a new “tech-medicine” route.

This positioning is not pie in the sky; it has already yielded concrete fruit in HKUST’s existing research. For instance, a team led by Professor Li Xiaomeng of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at HKUST, in collaboration with Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, developed PRET, an AI pathology analysis system capable of accurate multi-cancer diagnosis without the need for additional model training^※, demonstrating the feasibility of cross-border “AI + pathology diagnosis” collaboration. This pattern of pre-existing research collaboration between HKUST and top Greater Bay Area hospitals is of a piece with the agreements the medical school later signed with three affiliated hospitals of Zhejiang University, Fudan University’s Huashan Hospital, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Ruijin Hospital (see Section 9, “What does this win mean?”, and Part 2, Section 5 “Clinical placement hospital network”^※), giving “tech-driven medicine” a research bedrock that existed before the medical school itself—rather than being a mere student-recruitment trope.

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# 7. What is special about HKUST’s MBBS programme? How does it differ from HKU’s and CUHK’s?

The HKUST School of Medicine (SMED) will offer a four-year, graduate-entry (second-entry) Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) programme^※, in contrast to the six-year direct-entry undergraduate MBBS offered by the University of Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Applicants must hold a bachelor’s degree in a science, engineering, or healthcare-related discipline and submit MCAT or GAMSAT scores (taken within the two years prior to application). This “second degree” positioning shifts the school’s student intake from recent secondary-school leavers to university graduates who already possess disciplinary backgrounds, making it more conducive to recruiting interdisciplinary talent with research mindsets and familiarity with AI and data science.

# Curriculum phases

# Six Integrated Longitudinal Themes

The curriculum is threaded through all four years by six longitudinal themes: Evidence-Based Medicine and Precision Medicine; Technology, AI, Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Professionalism, Ethics and Humanism; Healthcare Quality, Safety and High Performance; Health Policy, Economics and Management; and Public Health and Global Health Security. Among these, the “Technology, AI, Innovation and Entrepreneurship” theme most vividly embodies HKUST’s differentiated positioning vis-à-vis HKU and CUHK, and the programme also offers intercalated Master’s/PhD options to support the cultivation of academic clinicians.

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# 8. How many students in the first intake? When does it start? What proportion of non-local students?

According to SCMP reports^※, the admissions arrangements for the HKUST School of Medicine are as follows:

HKUST plans to open global admissions in 2027 or earlier, by which time applicants may come from Hong Kong, mainland China, and internationally. The first 50 students will begin classes in the new premises upon completion of the Medical Building on the Clear Water Bay campus in mid-2028 (for details of the building construction, see HKUST School of Medicine (in preparation) (Part 2)^※).

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# 9. What does this win mean? How will it reshape Hong Kong’s medical education landscape?

The approval of the HKUST School of Medicine marks the first structural expansion of Hong Kong’s medical education landscape in 44 years—ever since the CUHK Faculty of Medicine was founded in 1981, Hong Kong has had only two medical schools. In his approval statement, Chief Executive John Lee noted that the third medical school “will collaborate closely with the existing two medical schools, complementing one another’s strengths, to elevate Hong Kong’s level of research and medical education and respond to the national goal of building a strong country in education”^※.

For HKUST itself, the approval of the medical school represents one of the most significant disciplinary expansions since its founding in 1991, moving it from a comprehensive university dominated by engineering and science towards a full spectrum of medicine, engineering, science, and business. By channelling its existing strengths in AI, data science, and robotics into medical education, HKUST is pioneering a new “tech-driven medicine” pathway. If this differentiated positioning is successfully executed, it will open up a new track oriented towards “doctor-scientists,” beyond the traditional clinical-medicine training market dominated by HKU and CUHK, and will occupy a distinctive position within the Greater Bay Area’s medical-innovation ecosystem.

Note: The admissions plans, curriculum structure, and bid details described in this article are as recorded in the source pages and are time-sensitive; relevant arrangements will be continuously updated, and readers should refer to the latest official HKUST announcements before citing them.

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Continued in HKUST School of Medicine (in preparation) (Part 2) – Founding dean, medical building groundbreaking, and Ngau Tam Mei long-term plan^※: Professor Li Jing appointed as founding dean; groundbreaking of the approximately HK$2 billion Medical Education and Research Complex; 40 international clinical partnership agreements; and the two-phase roadmap for the permanent campus at Ngau Tam Mei.

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# Further reading

• HKUST wins Hong Kong’s “third medical school” (November 2025) – the bid battle against PolyU and HKBU^※: An examination of the bidding system, the composition of the Task Group on the Establishment of the New Medical School, the ten assessment criteria, the timeline of two rounds of questioning, and the institutional pivots of PolyU and HKBU after their unsuccessful bids
• HKUST School of Medicine (in preparation) (Part 2) – Founding dean, medical building groundbreaking, and Ngau Tam Mei long-term plan^※: Profile of founding dean Professor Li Jing, the spec of the medical building groundbreaking, the international clinical partnership hospital network, and the two-phase Ngau Tam Mei roadmap
• Robotics and Artificial Intelligence^※: The Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute and the von Neumann Institute — the research backbone of “tech-driven medicine”
• Key Laboratories and Research Institutes (Part 1)^※: The State Key Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience and other medical-related research infrastructure

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