IBT of Miami-Designed Hospital Earns Honors in Central America

By Eric Althoff

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic—A trauma hospital built in the Dominican Republic by IBT of Miami has earned top honors on the 2019 HospiRank list of the best-equipped hospitals in Latin America. The list, released in December, honored the Dr. Ney Arias Lora Traumatology Hospital in the Dominican capital city of Santo Domingo. HospiRank’s list was published by analytical data firm Global Health Intelligence. Five hospitals in the Dominican Republic alone were included on the list.

The Dr. Ney Arias Lora Traumatology Hospital first opened in 2010 as just one part of what the hospital’s website calls a “large multi-phase development titled City of Health.” This hospital represents the first completed part of the so-called City of Health “turnkey” project.

According to Dominican Today, the hospital’s namesake, Dr. Ney Bienvenido Arias Lora Hospital, was born in 1926, and he attended college and then later earned a medical degree at the University of Santo Domingo. During his residencies he specialized in neurological medicine in New York, Boston and Oxford, England. In 1959 he returned to the Dominican Republic, where he became the country’s first ever certified neurosurgeon. In 1963 he set up the country’s first neurosurgery residency program at Salvador B. Gautier Hospital and later was the president of the Dominican Society of Neurology and Neurosurgery. Dr. Arias also taught medicine at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, as well as at East Central University in Oklahoma, and he was a visiting professor at several other international colleges as well. His later years were partially devoted to politics, and he ever served as the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to Japan in the mid-1990s.

Dr. Arias died of a stroke in 2007 at the age of 80. The trauma center was named for him upon its opening in 2010 in recognition of his contributions to the cause of advancing the field of neuroscience in the Dominican Republic.

“We are proud that Dr. Ney Arias Lora Traumatology Hospital in the Dominican Republic has been recognized for excellence, demonstrating IBT’s skill to develop turnkey projects on time and within budget that meet exacting specifications,” Daniel Toledano, managing director and chief operations officer at IBT of Miami, said in a statement. “We delivered the trauma hospital with the quality infrastructure required to handle a high volume of medical procedures.”

In addition to the Dr. Ney Arias Lora Traumatology Hospital, IBT has developed three other hospitals at the City of Health complex in Santo Domingo.

IBT has also designed and built 11 turnkey hospitals in the Dominican Republic, and the firm currently is in construction on six other such facilities across other countries in Latin America such as Panama and Peru. The firm, whose corporate headquarters are in Miami, employs 4,500 people on four continents.