Dr. Atul Gawande will lead the joint healthcare venture between Amazon, J.P. Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway, the three companies announced June 20.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a partnership in January to tackle rising healthcare costs.
They will form a new company for the venture, which will be headquartered in Boston, a hub for biotechnology and medical research. It will be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.”
Gawande will start July 9. He currently practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.
He is founding executive director of Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center. He’s also written numerous books, including “Being Mortal” and “The Checklist Manifesto.”
Gawande will transition to chairman of Ariadne Labs from executive director, the organization said in a press release. He will not give up his positions at Harvard or Brigham and Women’s Hospital and will keep writing, including for The New Yorker.
The trio hasn’t laid out a specific plan for the new company, which has yet to be named. The overarching vision is to lower healthcare costs for employers.
J.P. Morgan’s Dimon told CNBC earlier in June that this is a long-term initiative. He said there are a lot of ideas out there and things they know can be done better, pointing to fraud, administrative costs, overuse and underuse of various drugs, and specialized procedures.
Gawande has been vocal about his ideas to improve healthcare and lower costs. He has advocated more integration in healthcare, saying in a 2012 TED Talk that the ones getting the best results at the lowest costs have found ways to get all the different pieces to come together into a whole.
Despite momentum around the venture, some healthcare experts have been skeptical about whether Buffett, Dimon, and Bezos, while business icons, can simplify the current system.
