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Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

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Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#31

Post by aaavl2821 »

slantedview wrote: post #24
40acres wrote: post #16

Solid 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.

This is a separate debate, but id argue that consolidation, not fragmentation, is the current primary flaw in the system

It's a zero sum consolidation arms race between payers and providers with patients and physicians as pawns

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#32

Post by jonlucc »

maxxxxx wrote: post #29
entee wrote: post #12

Atul 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.

This is exactly the same logic I heard used by many people voting for Trump. The truth is that there usually is a real downside from failure, even if it feels like our huge systems are as bad as they can get. In other words, while we do have an expensive system with worse outcomes than peer nations, at least right now we have healthcare being delivered at a first-world level, and we shouldn't take that for granted.

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#33

Post by mFixman »

I've read most of Atul Gawande's books about the medical industry (Better, Complications, and The Checklist Manifesto) and I found the three of them extremely relevant to my career as a computer scientist. The latter book is by far his most famous, but IMHO the other two are much better.

This is a bold choice by Amazon, but it seems like a good idea even if it's just for name recognition.

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#34

Post by [deleted] »

entee wrote: post #12

Atul 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…

[deleted]

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#35

Post by blinkingled »

entee wrote: post #26
blinkingled wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

That's the traditional way of thinking and it might work well for traditional companies - but something as disruptive as this - I would vote for the visionary/thinker any day over the dyed in the wool, set in his ways guy.

Jobs/Sculley and later Tim Cook situation comes to mind - Sculley had the whole CEO experience but look how that turned out and look at how Tim Cook took over operations part which Jobs had no interest or knowledge of and made it work so well. If they had Tim Cook as the CEO pre-iphone days - I am not sure if we would have seen the iPhone.

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#36

Post by where_do_i_live »

jonlucc wrote: post #32
maxxxxx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly the same logic I heard used by many people voting for Trump. The truth is that there usually is a real downside from failure, even if it feels like our huge systems are as bad as they can get. In other words, while we do have an expensive system with worse outcomes than peer nations, at least right now we have healthcare being delivered at a first-world level, and we shouldn't take that for granted.

Well... uhh... this guy is not in charge of everyone's healthcare - he's in charge of a rather small group of companies instead.

The consequences of failure here are not exactly analogous to your example. 330 million people are not going to impacted by whatever is considered a failure here.

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#37

Post by mattnewton »

entee wrote: post #12

Atul 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…

Bezos has a reputation as a micromanager- I am sure between him and a COO there will be training wheels long enough for the company to reach maturity.

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#38

Post by arkades »

entee wrote: post #12

Atul 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…

>Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust

No, he’s not.

No offense to him, but he’s a -popularizer-. He takes various bits the HC quality improvement folks have been talking about / doing for years and writes (very articulate, engaging) articles that make it accessible to the wider community, including the wider medical community that normally isn’t in on those discussions. He also has a habit of relating it in a fairly shallow/one dimensional way, compared to the real deb-

Malcolm Gladwell. He’s Malcolm Gladwell, but for healthcare.

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#39

Post by jonlucc »

where_do_i_live wrote: post #36
jonlucc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the same logic I heard used by many people voting for Trump. The truth is that there usually is a real downside from failure, even if it feels like our huge systems are as bad as they can get. In other words, while we do have an expensive system with worse outcomes than peer nations, at least right now we have healthcare being delivered at a first-world level, and we shouldn't take that for granted.

Well... uhh... this guy is not in charge of everyone's healthcare - he's in charge of a rather small group of companies instead. The consequences of failure here are not exactly analogous to your example. 330 million people are not going to impacted by whatever is considered a failure here.

For now, but if I remember correctly, the goal is for these companies to offer this as their employees' health plans before expanding more broadly. For those people (and there are somewhere around a million customers between the companies), this could be worse than not being offered insurance.

Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon

#40

Post by alfredallan1 »

entee wrote: post #26
blinkingled wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

That, precisely, should be the COO’s job description. Like, almost literally.

Consider the alternative: the CEO is a professional “manager” who can run the shop, but may (or more likely, may not) understand what the shop is all about. Then who drives vision and strategy? Someone lower in the hierarchy can’t get himself taken seriously enough (sorry, but that’s just the nature of hierarchies). He (Atul) could be made the exec president or something of that sort, but an organization like this one needs a more hands-on visionary, who can corral the staff, while leaving the administrative and political minutiae to a trusted lieutenant.

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