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Earlier this year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon announced that they were teaming up to create their own healthcare company. health.
Their goal: To provide quality care to US employees of their businesses at a "more reasonable" cost than the country's current and inefficient health insurance system, which Buffet called "the hungry tapeworm of the economy." American. " the health industry.
"We share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the best talent in the country can, over time, curb rising health costs while simultaneously improving patient satisfaction and outcomes," said Berkshire Hathaway CEO.
Six months later, the mysterious new company still has no name or clearly defined strategy. But he has a chef and a house.
Dr. Atul Gawande, the famous surgeon Brigham and Women's Hospital, author, and New Yorker writer, was announced this week as CEO of the company backed by the CEO. The announcement also revealed that the company will be based in Boston.
The reaction was fast. Here's what experts say about Gawande, Boston and the company's aspirations following last week's news.
Why Gawande?
Although being a celebrity in his field, Gawande was a surprising and perhaps unconventional choice. Although he has done revealing and influential work in the health care sector, he also has no experience leading a company.
But is it necessarily a bad thing?
Dr. Elliott Fisher, Director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Care Policy and Clinical Practice, The Boston Globe:
"Health care in the United States obviously needs a heart transplant.Who better than a surgeon, better knowing health care in the United States than anyone I know, is guiding this effort?"
Larry Levitt, Senior Vice President of the Kaiser Family Foundation, on Twitter:
The interesting thing about @Atul_Gawande's choice for the Amazon / Berkshire / JPM effort is that he's focused on politics, communication and medical practice, not on business. This seems to present unpredictable potential directions for the new organization.
Dylan Byers, Senior Business and Technology Reporter for CNN:
"It's pretty much like a rental you can do in health care." Gawande is as important in health policy as it is in health journalism, thanks in part to a 2009 New York article. on the increase in health costs.But he has no experience of running a business. "
Paul Keckley, Independent Healthcare Policy Analyst, Bloomberg:
"His work has been largely focused on quality and safety.
This seems to be a selection with brand value, but the promise that Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire have made is to be a disruptive force in the industry that would put it back at more value and at less cost. You imagine that Atul will be a very effective spokesperson, but they will have to call on a rather strong team. "
Felix Salmon, business writer for Slate:
Gawande is an unconventional choice for the CEO. He has no management experience with a large company, and that's a good thing: ABC did not want typical CEOs because ABC is not a typical company. He wanted a leader with extensive knowledge of the health care industry, and he wanted someone who has the respect of the entire profession. This is successful on both counts.
…
Gawande has made his life a mission to improve people's health while keeping costs down, and he deserves a lot of credit for being able to successfully navigate the notorious internal policies of two different Boston institutions in order to 39 achieve this result at Ariadne [a joint health initiative launched by Brigham’s and Harvard]. Obviously, he is more than capable of managing even when he has multiple bosses working for entirely separate institutions.
Don Berwick, former administrator of Medicare and Medicaid service centers, at WBUR:
"Atul has a strong track record in implementation and management, has led a project on safe surgery that has touched almost every South Carolina hospital, and has executive jurisdiction to do this job, I am fully confident. "
Vivek Murphy, former US Surgeon General, on Twitter:
The choice of @Atul_Gawande to lead the Amazon-Berkshire-JP Morgan initiative is just great. There are few more qualified, thoughtful, eloquent and incisive health care leaders than Atul. More importantly, his moral commitment to improving health for all is unwavering.
What does this week's news mean?
The stated goal of the company is to use its scale to reduce health care costs by an independent company "without incentives or lucrative constraints". Experts say Gawande's recruitment signals that Bezos, Buffett and Dimon may seek to do so, not just for their own employees, but for the country as a whole.
Kenneth Kaufman, health care consultant, at World:
"What's interesting with these big companies is that they can use their employees as a lab.To create a laboratory model that changes health care in the US?" something that attracts Atul in the morning. "
Richard Gregg, director of programs for health care administration at Suffolk University, at the Boston Herald:
"It's a huge win for Boston, I'm very excited about it, it's attracting more attention to Boston – it's a major benefit." It reinforces our reputation as a world leader in the development of This is going to be a real learning lab in a relatively controlled environment – these three companies have the resources to do the work and study the best practices. "
Andy Slavitt, former Interim Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, at STAT:
"They hired someone who will think big pictures of public health problems as opposed to narrow business interests … This indicates that they are interested in solving the problem, not just finding an opportunity commercial.
It's hard work, trying to solve big problems, and there's [special] interests everywhere. They have already said that they will stick to [Gawande’s] ethical and moral center based on what is good for patients and people. As long as [Gawande] stick with that, I think it'll be fine. "
What is this company trying to do exactly?
Buffet said his goal was to stop at least the growing proportion of the economy devoted to health care. While there are some changes to be made to the way care is provided, the combination of Gawande's expertise with the resources and archives of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan also offers interesting possibilities.
Felix Salmon in Slate:
"There are certainly a lot of fruits at your fingertips: there is an opportunity, for example, to bring in many health services internally using salaried physicians and nurse practitioners, and to provide a variety of services. use these employees not only to treat common illnesses but also to work hard to prevent these conditions from occurring in the first place. The potential savings are not only obvious but also huge, even if you look only at the massively reduced amount of paperwork and billing. And insurers will have to play well with ABC, because of the size and commercial strength of the consortium. It is even possible, if not improbable, that ABC is trying to completely replace insurers. "
J.B. Silvers, professor of health finance at Case Western Reserve University, on MarketWatch:
"There is ample room to replicate this success in health care, because the system in the United States has long been plagued by excessive transaction costs – expenses incurred when buying or selling sales of goods and services, which include irrational prices, as evidenced by the price of services that vary greatly for hospitals, insurers and patients.This, with unnecessarily complicated billing systems, creates the need for extensive bureaucracies to manage all the varied relationships.
Companies like Amazon are trying to repair this kind of mess and make more convenient and transparent shopping for services. Imagine an easy-to-use platform where patients can easily assess the price and quality of competing providers and quickly schedule appointments or perhaps even launch an online consultation. We bet that Dr. Gawande imagines it.
Dylan Byers in CNN:
"A source close to the company's plans says it's going to focus on removing the pharmaceutical benefit managers that were meant to cut costs, but are now pushing them up."
Lisa Bielamowicz, Co-Founder and President of Gist Healthcare Consulting, at the World:
"One of the things that Amazon has done very well is to consider the value to the consumer as the light that guides every decision made.
…
How do you create an Amazon Prime for health care? How do you deliver so much value that people want to be a member?
Andrew Dreyfus, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, at the World:
"When they are called patients or consumers, they find health care confused, fragmented and sometimes even hostile to their needs. In the retail environment, we expect to be able to perform searches, purchases and easy transactions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These adjectives do not describe the health care experience . "
Steve Klasko, President and CEO of Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, at STAT:
"One of the challenges will be to bring the power of purchase to the person.If you think about it, we are going through a change once in a multigeneration." A business-to-business model business to a business-to-consumer model.A doctor and an administrator is the boss of the patient is the boss.From the hostile company to the consumer health entity.So, there? starts from the first day, thinking so and doing everything else to be a dependent variable – he does not listen to the "No, let me tell you how it's done" from each organization In the lobby world, he refuses to listen to them for the first four weeks and listen only to what other industries have done to transform their industry – so I think he will succeed. "
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