The devastating impacts of earthquakes have heightened global awareness regarding the urgent need for resilient structural systems. The critical importance of maintaining operational capacity in hospitals during and after seismic events necessitates the development of advanced structural solutions. Modular hospitals, characterized by their prefabricated and easily assembled components, present unique challenges and opportunities for seismic resilience. Self-centering (SC) technology has emerged as a promising solution to minimize residual deformation and facilitate rapid post-earthquake recovery, thereby significantly enhancing structural resilience. Among the innovative materials explored for SC systems, shape memory alloys (SMAs) stand out owing to their unique properties, including superelasticity and shape memory effect. This paper investigates the potential of novel flexural-type SMA-based devices in high-performance seismic-resistant structural systems, with a specific focus on modular hospital buildings. A comprehensive numerical and experimental investigation of flexural-type SMA-based SC systems was conducted, including the behavior of flexural-type SMA elements, SMA-based devices at component level and performance assessment of a prototype modular hospital structure incorporating SMA-based devices. Results demonstrated that SMA-based SC systems could significantly reduce residual deformation and accelerate post-earthquake functionality restoration. With SMA-based devices, critical infrastructures such as hospitals could maintain medical services with minimal interruption during moderate earthquakes and resume functionality substantially fast after severe seismic events.