Stanford University Medical Center is one of four hospitals affiliated with Stanford University and Stanford University School of Medicine, along with the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital , the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Palo Alto and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center . Its closest affiliations are with Packard Hospital and SUSM.

The hospital has 611 licensed beds. The facility is made up of the hospital building, the Pavilion, the Boswell Building, the Blake Wilbur Building and an outpatient psychiatry unit. Other medical buildings independent of the hospital stand nearby. The medical staff numbers 1850, including 493 full-time physicians (who also serve on the SU faculty), and together they operate in about 100 different speciality fields of medical practice.

The hospital's history began with the foundation of the Stanford Home for Convalescent Children in 1911. When the Medical School moved south from San Francisco in 1959, the hospital was established and was co-owned with Palo Alto. It was then known as Palo Alto-Stanford Hospital Center, until it was purchased by the University in 1968 and renamed. The Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine opened in 1989; the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford opened in 1991; the Richard M. Lucas Center for Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Imaging opened in 1992.