Health care is buzzing as Atul Gawande has been selected as CEO of the Berkshire-Hathaway/Amazon/JP Morgan strategic venture. I was thrilled they picked a physician, like myself, in the trenches to run their gig. After hearing the news, I remembered Gawande’s TED Talk from 2012 and decided to catch up on it during my flight to the Healthcare Finance Management Association Annual Meeting and Innovation Lab.
After watching the talk, “How do we heal medicine,” it occurred to me that while Gawande is a forward-thinking surgeon with good ideas on how to disrupt the systems of health care, he is a doc who has focused mainly on the sickest of patients. This doesn’t seem too disruptive since most of the spending in health care is focused on these patients already. Hopefully his experience in public health will guide his focus more upstream, providing the perspective we need to make an impact on spending. It will be interesting to see how he applies “Primary Prevention Thinking” to the Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway/JP Morgan Model. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase employees need to be healthy in order to work.
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