Ukraine’s first new-build hospital since Russia’s full-scale invasion opened May 24 in the western city of Brody. Behind its clinical readiness was New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health.
Northwell Health partnered with the nonprofit Sunflower Network to help shape Project Horizon, an $8 million modular pediatric hospital built from prefabricated components manufactured in Poland, transported across the border and assembled on site. The facility broke ground in November and opened less than six months later.
The Sunflower Network is a U.S.-based nonprofit with a real estate background. When its founders began thinking through how the building would actually function as a hospital, they turned to Northwell, which has been active in Ukraine since 2022 through telemedicine support, ambulance donations and mental health training.
Eric Cioè-Peña, MD, founder and vice president of Northwell’s Center for Global Health, led a site visit to Brody in January 2025 as part of a mental health training trip, bringing a pediatric emergency medicine specialist to tour the existing hospital, meet with medical leadership and assess what the new facility would actually need to do.
What they found was not a demand for inpatient ward capacity, but a need for emergency stabilization. Children were arriving in acute distress who needed to be assessed, treated and either transferred to a higher-level facility or monitored in a short-stay setting.
“Children are usually pretty well until they’re not,” Dr. Cioè-Peña told Becker’s. “They’re not a tertiary care facility in Brody, so they were going to see pediatric emergencies that they were going to have to stabilize and then transfer, or there were some instances of kids that were coming from so far away that they really needed to directly observe.”
That read on the epidemiology prompted a crucial design shift. Rather than building a traditional inpatient ward, Northwell pushed for rooms engineered as emergency department bays that could flex into observation or short-stay beds when needed — drawing on a well-worn tension in U.S. hospital operations. While emergency departments routinely board inpatients, the reverse is harder to pull off, Dr. Cioè-Peña said.
“We really wanted each of the rooms to have emergency capability while also being able to kind of flex into an inpatient room, and that was really the pivotal design change that we made early on,” he said.
The hospital also includes a built-in bomb shelter — likely a first for modular construction of this kind, Dr. Cioè-Peña said. The structure integrates with an existing basement that meets current Ukrainian code requiring shelter capability, allowing the facility to keep treating patients even during an active attack.
Beyond design, Northwell helped source and procure equipment for the facility, leveraging its supplier relationships to obtain medical supplies either donated or at cost. The health system is also continuing telemedicine support for Brody’s physicians through a platform it established in 2022. Through a QR code, any physician in Ukraine can connect to Northwell’s command center and schedule a consultation across virtually any medical specialty.
“We want to make sure that the doctors in Brody know that this is not just a building that we’re giving them — that we’re really invested in their success, and that we want them to call us whenever they need us,” Dr. Cioè-Peña said.
Northwell’s involvement required no significant financial outlay or travel beyond the initial site visit; most of the work happened over Zoom.
“We didn’t break the bank with Northwell,” Dr. Cioè-Peña said. “The idea that we were able to get this up and running for under $10 million is pretty tremendous when you think about the magnitude of what it normally costs to build a Joint Commission-ready building and have it outfitted and open in under six months.”
For Dr. Cioè-Peña, the project points to something broader: a model for how U.S. health systems can meaningfully lend a hand amid global crises without significant financial strain — and one that pays dividends internally.
“The amount of goodwill that we’ve developed with physicians at Northwell, collaborating with physicians in Ukraine, has been tremendous,” he said. “We feel pretty strongly that this is a very important tool for U.S. health systems to provide autonomy and purpose to its faculty and to its teaching staff in ways that U.S. healthcare just can’t do very easily.”
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