Imagine if these three companies used their political clout to push for single payer instead of setting up yet another insurance company.
Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
21–30 of 146 posts
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#22Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust. This is still probably a terrible choice of CEO. To my knowledge he has never run a large organization or dealt directly with the complex backend of the healthcare system. The was healthcare is delivered and paid for is full of independent, semi monopolistic players that have often conflicting incentives. Oh an…
Fair point but Atul strikes to me as a problem solver kind of person. He has obviously got the intellect and precedent in that area. What I also think is this is _the_ job that will benefit greatly from a guy who has a fresh outlook not sullied by existing ways of doing things.
As another person said below, they could easily hire a COO to deal with existing aspects of the system and still have the overall direction in the hands of someone like Atul.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#23I love Gawande; he's an amazing author and very thoughtful, systematic physician. That being said, to my knowledge he has never actually run anything before or operated on the back end of healthcare, so it seems like sort of a strange choice for an org this size and of this type. Additionally, his (publicly stated) thinking seems to primarily revolve around systematizing routine practice to reliably increase outcomes…
To be fair the people running existing health care organisations are all experienced at creating the sort of company they want to avoid.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#24Solid choice. He's a brilliant guy and obviously has deep knowledge of current flaws in out system.
Fragmentation - such as the creation of this company - is the primary flaw in the system. His leading that company stands in opposition to the ability to fix healthcare.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#25Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust. This is still probably a terrible choice of CEO. To my knowledge he has never run a large organization or dealt directly with the complex backend of the healthcare system. The was healthcare is delivered and paid for is full of independent, semi monopolistic players that have often conflicting incentives. Oh an…
Came here to say this.
This is the equivalent of promoting your best developer into management. Atul is a smart hard working guy. I’m sure he’ll work hard and do ok, but on the face of it he’s a silly choice.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#26Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust. This is still probably a terrible choice of CEO. To my knowledge he has never run a large organization or dealt directly with the complex backend of the healthcare system. The was healthcare is delivered and paid for is full of independent, semi monopolistic players that have often conflicting incentives. Oh an…
Fair point but Atul strikes to me as a problem solver kind of person. He has obviously got the intellect and precedent in that area. What I also think is this is _the_ job that will benefit greatly from a guy who has a fresh outlook not sullied by existing ways of doing things. As another person said below, they could easily hire a COO to deal with existing aspects of the system and still have the overall direction i…
That certainly makes some sense, but in that case maybe someone who has run a big organization, or built a product would be helpful. I look around and see very few successful startups that were successful on the vision of the CEO alone. So much of success comes from being able to break down walls and get things to work together that didn’t before. Maybe he can do it, but that’s really hard to do. I’d prefer betting on someone who has demonstrated that ability.
Put another way it’s like giving $100M seed round to a visionary but completely unproven founder when the company is not even at garage stage. Might work out, but seems quite a bit more likely to fail than $100M given to someone who had done something like it before.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#27Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust. This is still probably a terrible choice of CEO. To my knowledge he has never run a large organization or dealt directly with the complex backend of the healthcare system. The was healthcare is delivered and paid for is full of independent, semi monopolistic players that have often conflicting incentives. Oh an…
from my experience, getting these senior insiders to lead a newco would just result in more incremental innovation. Most of them came up in and benefited from the current broken system and are either too conservative to embrace drastic change or don't want to rock the boat.
I don't think something like Kaiser could be easily rebuilt from scratch, but I don't know too much about the Mayo Clinic except for its reputation for clinical excellence and their active investments in innovation. Have they implemented new models to meaningfully lower cost of care?
I also imagine Atul gawande has enough experience with the existing system to know what ideas have a chance of working vs running into a brick wall of conflicting incentives. He can hire somebody to lead negotiations with insurance companies and providers, etc
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#28Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust. This is still probably a terrible choice of CEO. To my knowledge he has never run a large organization or dealt directly with the complex backend of the healthcare system. The was healthcare is delivered and paid for is full of independent, semi monopolistic players that have often conflicting incentives. Oh an…
His ideas aren't that impressive. All of his language still talks of "delivery" of health care. It's like listening to someone talk of new ways to deliver pizza. Your new delivery method may be revolutionary, but delivery is only a small part of the business. You are still delivering the same pizza. You aren't questioning whether the pizza is helping the people eating it, or whether it should be delivered in the first place.
My hope lies with those who question the product, not the delivery methodology. The US needs to rethink health care, not how they provide or pay for it. They needs to rethink how many prescriptions they shovel into the population. They need to rethink how they pigeonhole patients. They need to get people exercising. Those changes aren't going to come from anyone still talking about "how we deliver health care".
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#29Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust. This is still probably a terrible choice of CEO. To my knowledge he has never run a large organization or dealt directly with the complex backend of the healthcare system. The was healthcare is delivered and paid for is full of independent, semi monopolistic players that have often conflicting incentives. Oh an…
Considering how f...ed up the American health system is on all levels I am fine with giving an outsider a chance. Gawande appears to be a reasonable guy and a good communicator. Even if he fails, nothing is lost because the system can't get worse.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#30"The new company will be based in Boston." Just wondering if there's a big regulatory benefit to being in Massachusetts.
Atul gawande is based there and the Boston area is actually ahead of the Bay Area in terms of biotech startup scene and similar if not better in terms of healthcare services