Management

Atul Gawande Named CEO of New Health Company Aimed at Quelling Rising Care Costs

With Gawande at the helm, the new company aims to call on technology in order to take on the rising costs of healthcare.

Juliet Van Wagenen

Juliet is the senior web editor for BizTech and HealthTech magazines. In her six years as a journalist she has covered everything from aerospace to indie music reviews — but she is unfailingly partial to covering technology.

The new healthcare company started by Amazon, J.P. Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway has chosen Atul Gawande as the organization's chief executive officer.

Gawande is a " globally-renowned surgeon, writer and public health innovator" who practices endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is a professor at the Harvard Medical School, according to a statement from the new company. Gawande will take the helm of the organization on July 9.

“I’m thrilled to be named CEO of this healthcare initiative,” said Gawande in the press release. “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 organization, which is as of yet unnamed, aims to take on the rising costs of employee healthcare and improve user satisfaction via technology.