Professor Atul Gawande, M.D. delivers speech during Geisinger Health System A Century of... [+] Transformation and Innovation Symposium at Pine Barn Inn on September 25, 2015 in Danville, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for Geisinger Health System) News that Amazon, Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have picked noted surgeon, speaker and writer Dr. Atul Gawande to run their healthcare venture has the business community wondering what his solutions will be to fix healthcare. They should look no further than South Carolina’s hospitals, where a Gawande effort helped reduce post-surgical deaths by more than 20 percent over several years thanks in part to work of Gawande’s Ariadne Labs, the South Carolina Hospital Association and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Ariadne Labs helped South Carolina hospitals to implement the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist, which is designed to reduce human errors during surgery by checking and documenting everything from a patient’s name to accounting for every needle or instrument used during surgery. It was considered a first to implement “large-scale population-wide impact of the checklist,” Harvard researchers said last year. And it’s the kind of work online retail giant Amazon, JPMorgan and Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway can expect for their more than 1 million employees, say those who know Gawande and the global work of Ariadne Labs, which recently celebrated its five-year anniversary and is based in Boston, which the new Amazon-JPMorgan-Berkshire health venture will also call home. “He’s had major successes with national ministries of health around the world and has done tremendous work with groups like the South Carolina Hospital Association,” Dr. Donald Berwick, who was the head of Medicare & Medicaid Services under President Barack Obama and is on the advisory board of Ariadne Labs said in an interview. The idea brought to the South Carolina hospitals was a simple one that came from outside of the walls of an inpatient facility or a healthcare executive suite. And that’s the kind of effort Gawande is expected to bring to Amazon, Berkshire and JPMorgan. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Company announced in January they want to create an “independent company” to improve healthcare and lower costs for their more than one million employees. In Gawande, Amazon, Buffett and JPMorgan are getting a physician who knows how healthcare is delivered “better than anyone,” say those who know him. “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,” Gawande said in a statement. “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," Gawande said. "This work will take time but must be done. The system is broken, and better is possible.” The three companies described Gawande as a “globally-renowned surgeon, writer and public health innovator.” Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. And he’s also founding executive director of Ariadne, which says its mission “is to create scalable health care solutions that deliver better care at the most critical moments of people’s lives, everywhere.” The U.S. employer community is watching closely what Gawande comes up with for Amazon, Berkshire and JPMorgan. “While it’s too early to tell the direction this endeavor will take, we applaud their effort and long-term view,” National Business Group on Health CEO Brian Marcotte said. “This industry is ripe for disruption and the collective resources of these three companies, coupled with Amazon’s customer obsession and supply chain savvy, could potentially create a more consumer-focused model that will transcend the fragmented, provider-centric delivery system that we have today,” Marcotte said. “We know that technology will continue to play an increasing role in how consumers access and receive health care.”
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Co have appointed a surgeon who helped reduce post-surgical deaths in South Carolina hospitals as the CEO of their joint healthcare venture. The move by the two companies to form an alliance is part of a broader push for more collaboration between big U.S. health care providers that has been gaining steam since President Donald Trump took office.