by Tim Llewellyn

Last month I had the honor of traveling with a team from Ariadne Labs to Costa Rica in order to document the country’s Primary Healthcare system, which has become a model for the world. We traveled all over the country where I photographed doctors, nurses, administrators and patients. Most days were 4 AM wake-up calls to travel to remote healthcare facilities – but the access and exposure we received were incredible.

The Costa Rican government reformed its country’s healthcare system back in the ‘90’s, with an emphasis on quality primary care. They committed to making team-based, data-driven and life-long primary care accessible equitably to the country’s population. It was interesting for me to see how much the people of Costa Rica now appreciated and respected their healthcare system.

I was first introduced to Ariadne Labs when I photographed their founder, Atul Gawande, for his book Being Mortal. Dr. Gawande is a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the author of several best-selling books, a writer for the New Yorker, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Harvard Medical school, among many, many other things. A collaboration between the Brigham and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Ariadne Labs is a Boston-based healthcare innovation center that is focused on using real world data, a rigorous scientific approach, and best practices to uncover and share programs that improve patient care around the world.

I’m extremely proud of this series of photographs, and I’m equally proud to play even a small part in the story that Ariadne Labs is telling about the Costa Rican healthcare system and how other countries can learn from its success.