So if anybody was in doubt on how serious Amazon/JP Morgan /Berkshire is: @Atul_Gawande named to head new firm to serve their health/effort
Atul Gawande, a surgeon, and journalist who has written extensively about the U.S. failure to grapple with rising health-care 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 start on July 9. It will be independent of the three firms, whose leaders formed the group as a way of contending with what Berkshire Chief Executive Officer Warren Buffett called a “tapeworm” eating the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 — its name, size, budget and authority — weren’t immediately available. It will be an “independent entity that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” the group said in the statement.
read on at Bloomberg.
