This is the type of topic where I feel that HN community tends to not provide valuable insight as it's outside of the community's collective expertise. How many individuals here have hired SVP+ level employees and how would that compare to the collective experience of Bezos, Buffet, and Dimon?
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
#82Atul 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…
Yes! Great minds think alike, arkades! I completely agree with you and disagree with the two commentators. Atul is absolutely a good communicator/storyteller/popularizer (whatever terminology suits people). I used to read his Cheesecake Factory article where he discussed standardization of healthcare, which I thought it was good.
In the recent years, I find him at an excess amount of healthcare conferences speaking or writing on topics that's not within his realm of expertise such as patient experience, opioid pandemic, technology, artifical intelligence. The audience is often captivated by his stories and writing to not be able to differentiate how he's really repeating others' work and quick to write about what's currently trending in healthcare.
He's a good writer, physician, knowledgeable but not an executor.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s actually my point, I would argue Gawande doesn’t have expert knowledge. Being an expert surgeon is a very different skill set than an expert in healthcare delivery and management. Let’s take the checklist manifesto, a fantastic idea that unfortunately isn’t as widely applied as it should be. Why? Because if you ask most surgeons they’ll say, “yeah it’s a great idea, I do it already/I don’t need to do it though…
Surgeons don't get to play God as much anymore. Checklists dominate and are the hallmark of a good institution. One of the biggest risks in hospitals are central lines and infection. So cleaning protocols / enforcement and as much automation as possible are ways forward. The ACA imposes financial penalties on hospitals if they don't reduce infection rates and readmission rates. You can only do that if you improve qua…
Also, I think Gawande _wrote_ "The Checklist Manifesto"!
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#84Imagine if these three companies used their political clout to push for single payer instead of setting up yet another insurance company.
If you're asking yourself why you're getting downvoted, it's because you committed blasphemy by saying s * * * * p * * * * in the USA.
I disagree — lots of HN denizens support a single-payer model. What's silly is thinking that Amazon et al could trivially push it through within a reasonable timeframe.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#85Ouch. This is an incredible man who is a bad choice of CEO. CEO is fundamentally an execution-oriented, anti-creative role. Bezos know this and it implies that
1) He’s going to CEO this himself 2) He wants this intiative to fail
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inte…
Great comparison, but other than articles what kind of products or scalable accomplishments has Atul Gawande achieved in healthcare that is comparable to the impact of the iPhone?
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#87Ouch. This is an incredible man who is a bad choice of CEO. CEO is fundamentally an execution-oriented, anti-creative role. Bezos know this and it implies that 1) He’s going to CEO this himself 2) He wants this intiative to fail
I think you are confusing CEO with COO.
CEO typically is providing vision, mission & strategic direction while the executive team he builds is more execution oriented.
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
That's not at all the case. http://atulgawande.com/about/ Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also Executive Dir…
Oh, I know he’s a surgeon. He and I have very similar backgrounds, save that I spent a decade in hc QI and Health insurance mgmt before going to medical school, rather than picking it up subsequently.
I point that out so you fully understand that when I say a doctor:healthcare QI as a bees:entomologist, I say that from both sides of the fence. It gives you some more insight in your little slice, but that’s it. And it’s just your little slice: I am not a surgeon, so I know jack shit about their operational processes. I do know from a recent kerfuffle in my hospital that even the surgeons don’t know much about how the OR department books rooms and schedules procedures. They certainly don’t have insight into the parts of the hospital that -aren’t- a core part of their job. Being a physician is an important window into how hc systems and organizations work, but it’s a tiny one. It doesn’t qualify one for hc QI by itself.
As to his cv, by all means, check out where he’s first author, where he’s “contributing guy with a name” (second to last), how many of them are editorials or round tables, how many of them are endocrine surgery, etc. Actual first author, non editorial healthcare ops papers are thin on the ground.
This feels like nitpicking. The guy is intelligent and accomplished, beyond question. But what he -isn’t- is a hc innovator just because he -writes- about the hc system and innovations therein. I’ve never seen him write on a topic that wasn’t already hot shit in the field for two decades; I’ve never seen him present the pile of conflicting data for his preferred solutions (eg, the Checklist Manifesto chose to elide how many hospitals implemented checklists to no improvement, despite plenty of the results being published before his book.)
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inte…
Great comparison, but other than articles what kind of products or scalable accomplishments has Atul Gawande achieved in healthcare that is comparable to the impact of the iPhone?
This is getting tiring but the point is Atul can be the idea guy, the overall philosophy guy and they can hire other people who have product or scalable accomplishments to execute on the ideas. I think you're not giving Atul enough credit for what he brings to the being the idea guy and having first hand knowledge of what those ideas are about, being able to articulate those etc. He was also a WHO director who ran a successful project reducing surgical deaths around the world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande
Re: Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
That's not at all the case. http://atulgawande.com/about/ Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also Executive Dir…
Fair enough, he's a popularizer and also a top-tier surgeon.
I agree with parent comment -- there is a difference between being the person/people who came up with brilliant ideas and being the person who brought them to the masses in a pithy, cogent and engaging manner.
One might even make the argument that the latter task is relatively more important than the former for people in high-visibility figurehead type positions such as CEO of a massively ambitious new healthcare venture.
The "Gladwell for healthcare" comparison is a good one, and I say that as someone who has enjoyed reading Gawande's books.