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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

#41

Post by blinkingled »

sandworm101 wrote: post #28
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…

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 firs…

> [...] 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".

If you went to investors and used that as a pitch you'd be laughed out quick. Need to get people exercising? That's exactly the sort of unrealistic target that you don't want to have if you're going to run a company. Instead focusing on what could be realistically improved and doing that - which delivery inefficiencies are certainly a part of - that sounds like the most reasonable way to deal with something as big of a cluster f* the healthcare system in the US is.

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

#42

Post by projectramo »

When I read the checklist manifesto I thought it was going to change my life. It didn't because I didn't put it into effect.

Then I thought it would be great if software did the work for me, including communal checklists that people can share with me. (Got a new car, here is a checklist template. Got a new house? Here is the checklist template? Is it an investment property, use this checklist. Oh, that is good for Florida, but in Texas, use this one.)

I found some software that is sort of close but nothing quite there.

Edit: Atul Gawande wrote the book so it is sort of tangentially related. I could make it more relevant by explaining how his checklists make him a general purpose leader or something, but I can't bring myself to do it.

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

#43

Post by miketery »

projectramo wrote: post #42

When I read the checklist manifesto I thought it was going to change my life. It didn't because I didn't put it into effect. Then I thought it would be great if software did the work for me, including communal checklists that people can share with me. (Got a new car, here is a checklist template. Got a new house? Here is the checklist template? Is it an investment property, use this checklist. Oh, that is good for Fl…

Care to share what you found?

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

#44

Post by adventured »

jonlucc wrote: post #39
where_do_i_live wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have no publicly stated goal to expand more broadly. That's nothing more than media speculation and or wishful thinking.

Buffett has repeatedly said this is not an entity that is meant to offer services beyond the scope of the three companies or similar. They plan to share what they learn, and Buffett has said he hopes that can help other companies and the wider healthcare system.

Here's probably the best talk he has given on the subject (13 minutes long, from a few months ago):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4fuVC6zCJI

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

#45

Post by karl11 »

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…

I would argue that you should give Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon more credit.

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

#46

Post by desireco42 »

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…

He will have great C suite of people to support him. He is compassionate, smart, good communicator, he will be fine as CEO and great choice for Amazon and others.

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

#47

Post by trevormorgan »

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.

[flagged]

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

#48

Post by projectramo »

miketery wrote: post #43
projectramo wrote: post #42

When I read the checklist manifesto I thought it was going to change my life. It didn't because I didn't put it into effect. Then I thought it would be great if software did the work for me, including communal checklists that people can share with me. (Got a new car, here is a checklist template. Got a new house? Here is the checklist template? Is it an investment property, use this checklist. Oh, that is good for Fl…

Care to share what you found?

Sure. Well every to-do app has most of the functionality you need (Wunderlist is the one I like the best).

They have annual reminders so you can put a checklist for taxes or something.

BJ Novak has https://li.st/bjnovak/ which is a general list sharing app.

It has the social component that I think would be very useful applied to to-do lists.

Finally, there are ready made list apps which help you maintain your home, health, car, kids, wealth etc.

I wish there was a social market place like li.st for apps like Wunderlist with multiple lists to choose from.

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

#49

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

He will.be in charge of a relatively small company that still has very vague goals. He won't be running Medicare. If we are afraid of experiments on even the smallest scale there will never be any improvement.

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

#50

Post by rattray »

baus wrote: post #18
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…

I’d say hire that person as the COO. This will be a big organization. I think the person at the top needs to have a strong ideals about the direction of the organization

Agreed – there's so much complexity that wrangling it is it's own effort, worthy of delegation to a supremely skilled and experienced operator.

If _all_ this company did was wrangle the complexity of the healthcare system, however, they wouldn't be a step function better than anything else.

For the deeper, more radical changes, you need a visionary at the helm.

Of course, Atul will need to be able to effectively recruit & work with a stellar team to fill the gaps you mention.

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