Atul Gawande to head Bezosbacked firm
NEW YORK/MEXICO CITY: Atul Gawande, a surgeon and journalist who has written extensively about the US failure to grapple with rising healthcare spending, has been named to head a new health venture for Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The new firm—meant to help the three companies improve care and lower costs—will be based in Boston and Gawande will begin his stint on July 9. It will be independent from the three firms, whose leaders formed the group as a way of contending with what Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett called a “tapeworm” eating the US economy. “I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better health-care delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world,” Gawande said in a statement from the group announcing his appointment.
Along with his writing and medical practice, Gawande is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. Gawande is a prominent name in health-care policy circles, though hasn’t run a major business. Many details of the new venture weren’t immediately available. It will be an “independent entity that is free from profitmaking incentives and constraints,” the group said in the statement. The companies announced in January that they were forming the venture to improve employee health care.