Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan Name Atul Gawande Healthcare CEO
The new Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan joint healthcare company, which will be based in Boston, named Atul Gawande as the inaugural CEO.
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By - Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase have named Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, as the CEO of their joint healthcare company. The company will be headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
Gawande will begin his tenure of the unnamed company on July 9, 2018. The company will operate as an independent, non-profit firm. The newly named CEO is also a professor at the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health, the founder of school’s healthcare innovation center, Ariadne Labs, and a staff writer at The New Yorker covering the healthcare industry.
“I’m thrilled to be named CEO of this healthcare initiative,” Gawande said.
“I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better healthcare delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world. Now I have the backing of these remarkable organizations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all. This work will take time but must be done. The system is broken, and better is possible.”
The leaders of Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Berkshire Hathaway previously announced their decision to hire a CEO based on expertise leveraging health IT, analytics, chronic disease management, and patient engagement to improve healthcare experiences for members.
The joint healthcare company is still early in its development, but leaders of the three founding firms want to provide their employees with meaningful healthcare interactions that leverage value-based care practices.
These practices specifically include creating wellness programming, equipping patients and providers with data to improve healthcare decision making, and reducing waste and fraud in healthcare spending.
In a public statement, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos expressed confidence that Gawande is the right executive to deliver on the company’s expectations.
“As employers and as leaders, addressing healthcare is one of the most important things we can do for our employees and their families, as well as for the communities where we all work and live,” Dimon said. “Together, we have the talent and resources to make things better, and it is our responsibility to do so. We’re so grateful for the countless statements of support and offers to help and participate, and we’re so fortunate to have attracted such an extraordinary leader and innovator as Atul.”
Bezos added, “We said at the outset that the degree of difficulty is high and success is going to require an expert’s knowledge, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation. Atul embodies all three, and we’re starting strong as we move forward in this challenging and worthwhile endeavor.”
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett agreed with his colleagues that selecting Gawande as the ambitious company’s new leader can help lower costs and improve the quality of care for their employees.
“Jamie, Jeff and I are confident that we have found in Atul the leader who will get this important job done,” Buffet said.
