High-Tech Hospital Goes Belly-Up in Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (July 13) – Two months ago, Dr. Reynold Savain was the director of the most state-of-the-art hospital in this country. Now, he walks the empty corridors of the 43,000-square-foot Centre Hospitalier du Sacre-Coeur with a stunned expression.

Millions of dollars of equipment gather dust. In the driveway, tarps cover two brand-new ambulances. A colorful school of koi, still young, swim unnoticed in the rapidly dying pond in the front lobby.

"Any private hospital, in any country, anywhere in the world, that sees 12,600 patients in three months -- for free -- is going to go bankrupt," Savain told AOL News.

The private hospital, known as CDTI, is located in the heart of Port-au-Prince, just a few blocks from Haiti's collapsed National Palace. Physically, the medical building withstood the earthquake, but financially, the weight was too much to bear.


On Jan. 12, Savain opened the doors of the hospital to Haiti's wounded and to numerous international organizations and volunteer doctors. But even after treating thousands of patients, no one stepped up to pay his staff of 177. Medical machinery was worked to its limits then went unrepaired.

Facing mounting debt, Savain decided to close the doors to CDTI on March 31. Savain's facility saved lives because it had the equipment, staff and resources of a private hospital. And now, it has collapsed for the same reason.

"If nothing happens by July 31, I'm just going to sell all the equipment and rent the place out as offices," he says.

It is a startling truism that in Haiti today, ingenuity and investment are less valuable than real estate -- but especially when the government is not in your favor. Savain acknowledges that a strictly for-profit business model, as he originally intended for CDTI, could never work in today's economic climate.

He would like to see the hospital either bought by the government of Haiti or offer a mix of paid and subsidized health care, with the facility run by an American university.


The government of Haiti has stalled these plans, wary of collaborations with the private sector or the aid community, which has proved to be a fickle investor.

"If I just give the money like this, people will say I put it in [Savain's] pocket," Haiti's minister of health, Dr. Alex Larsen, said about CDTI at a recent press conference. "I can't take the money of the government and give it away."

International organizations and private investors have closely followed Larsen's statements on CDTI. Privately, one investor conceded that the hospital would never be able to receive international backing unless and until the government of Haiti committed to long-term public funding for the facility.

Aid money poured into Haiti after the earthquake, much of it earmarked for health care, but it remains invested in traditional funding patterns: malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, pregnant women, vaccinations, etc. Additional public health infrastructure is a tenet of Haiti's reconstruction plan, but so far, no progress has been made.

The vision of CDTI was to provide specialized care to those who could afford it, and ultimately, to create a space to educate medical students. Haiti educates doctors, but medical students in their residencies are generally unable to learn anything about specialties such as cardiology or oncology because public hospitals are so ill-equipped.


The shared public-private model, with Haiti's richest patients underwriting the needs of its poorest, could allow people to have access -- for the first time -- to equipment like X-rays and ultrasounds. But few investors are willing to take the kinds of financial and political risks that Savain took in building CDTI.

His story has circulated as a cautionary tale for people thinking of investing here, who are fearful that, in Haiti, private investment is not recognized as a public good.

For his part, Savain knows the future of the hospital is not up to him. If it fails, it will at least have the legacy of Jan. 12.

"I know some of the investors wish I hadn't opened the doors at all after the earthquake," he said. "They think this is my fault. But it wasn't on them. It was on me. Everyone knows this is my hospital and they would've pointed their fingers at me. Anyway, if I had it all to do over again, I'd do the same thing."