Dimon, Bezos, Buffett tap Harvard's Gawande for health firm

Atul Gawande, the surgeon and journalist who has written extensively about America’s failure to grapple with an inefficient health care system, will head a new venture for Amazon.com, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The new venture—meant to help the companies get their health care costs down—will be based in Boston. Gawande will start on July 9. It will be independent of the three firms, whose leaders formed the group as a way of grappling with what Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett called a “tapeworm” eating the American economy.  “I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better health-care delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world,” Gawande said in a statement from the group announcing his appointment. 

Along with his writing and medical practice, Gawande is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.

The firms announced in January they were forming the venture to improve employee health care.