Atul Gawande, MD, recently named chief executive of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase's unnamed healthcare company, will travel across the country to meet the employees he will serve and discuss their healthcare problems — one of Dr. Gawande's first tasks at the helm, STAT reports.
The road trip is expected to take place over the next several weeks, without the help of the well-known CEOs of the three companies, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon.
Dr. Gawande will meet one-on-one with many employees who work at the three companies to understand their healthcare needs and the barriers they face accessing care. It is the first step to setting priorities for the venture that has captured public attention.
The goal is to better understand how to lower costs and improve care for the 1.2 million people the three companies employ — a task experts say is challenging due to vast differences in geographic location, income and job descriptions of the employees.
Employees at the three companies have jobs ranging from bank teller to software engineer to factory worker and will have different healthcare concerns.
"Is Amazon's goal to make the office workers healthier in Seattle or the warehouse workers healthier around the country?” asked Kevin Schulman, MD, a professor at Stanford (Calif.) University's medical and business school, according to STAT. "Those are very different sets of challenges. Depending on where the warehouses are, there could be problems with access to healthcare. There could be problems with the quality of care available near some of these regional centers."
The healthcare venture does not yet have a headquarters, and its governance structure is unclear.
Read STAT's full report here.