Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon
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 and lets not forget that we have 50 states and 50 different sets of regulations.Unless the plan is to create a brand new completely vertically integrated system, you’re gonna have to deal with the existing infrastructure, and I’d be much more confident in success if the person leading that effort had experience there. Having worked with many physicians and insurance companies, I can say from experience those skill sets are not the same.Even if the idea is to be vertically integrated, someone like the CEO of the Mayo Clinic or Kaiser would have been a better choice.