A Visit to Planet Gawande

By Clive Riddle, June 22, 2018

We still don’t know much at all about what the heck the Amazon-Berkshire-JPMorgan healthcare triumvirate will be doing. But we do now know who will be running it. The renowned Dr. Atul Gawande has been appointed its Chief Executive Officer, effective July 9th.

 The announcement quotes Atul: “I’m thrilled to be named CEO of this healthcare initiative. I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better healthcare delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world. Now I have the backing of these remarkable organizations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all. This work will take time but must be done. The system is broken, and better is possible.”

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos says “we said at the outset that the degree of difficulty is high and success is going to require an expert’s knowledge, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation. Atul embodies all three, and we’re starting strong as we move forward in this challenging and worthwhile endeavor.”

For those who don’t already know all there is to know about Atul Gawande, let’s take a quick visit to Planet Gawande and check out the man who will be commanding the mystery ship Amazon-Berkshire-JPMorgan.

Atul’s website homepage succinctly provides this description: Atul Gawande is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of four books; (2) Atul Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and (3) Atul Gawande is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation. Of course, item #3 will require editing. As the already updated Ariadne Labs website announces “Atul Gawande transitions to Chairman and becomes CEO of new health care organization.”

What are Atul’s roots? He was born in 1965 in “Brooklyn, New York, to Indian immigrants to the United States, both doctors. His family soon moved to Athens, Ohio, where he and his sister grew up, and he graduated from Athens High School in 1983.”

As an undergraduate and in medical school, he dived into the worlds of politics and healthcare policy. He volunteered for Gary Hart's and Al Gore's presidential campaigns. He served a health-care researcher for Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN). He became Bill Clinton's healthcare lieutenant during the 1992 campaign. He served as senior HHS advisor after Clinton's inauguration and directed one a committee in the Clinton Health Care Task Force, before returning to medical school, re3ceiving his MD in 1995.

During his residency his career as a writer launched with Slate, and soon he was writing essays for the New Yorker. His June 2009 New Yorker essay, The Cost Conundrum was widely read and influential,  in which he compared the health care of two towns in Texas to show why health care was more expensive in one town compared to the other.. He continues to occasional whip out New Yorker Essays, with these being the titles of his works during the past 18 months:

• Curiosity and What Equality Really Means, The New Yorker, Jun 2, 2018
• Is Health Care a Right?, The New Yorker, Oct 2, 2017
• How the Senate’s Health-Care Bill Threatens the Nation’s Health, The New Yorker, Jun 26, 2017
• Trumpcare vs. Obamacare, The New Yorker, Mar 6, 2017
• Trumpcare, The New Yorker, Feb 27, 2017
• The Heroism of Incremental Care, The New Yorker, Jan 23, 2017

He has also written more technical papers and studies in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and has authored four books:

• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014)
• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right  (2009)
• Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (2007)
• Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Sciences (2002)

Of Gawande’s most recent book, Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “American medicine, Being Mortal reminds us, has prepared itself for life but not for death. This is Atul Gawande’s most powerful – and moving – book.”

Of course, the platforms from which Gawande has drawn the experiences and perspectives that he writes about is from being a clinician, researcher and academian. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a 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.

His outside affiliations have included Ariadne Labs where he has been Executive Director, Lifebox, Safesurg.org, WHO Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative and the Center for Surgery and Public Health.

Ariadne Labs might be the most instructive, in regard to the approaches Guwande might take in his new gig. Ariadne Labs is a joint center between Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, founded in 2012 by Gawande and others.

Here’s more about Ariadne Labs direct from their website – which says their mission is “to find solutions to some of the most complex problems in health care, including life-threatening errors in surgery, maternal and neonatal mortality, failures in end-of-life care, and fragmented and ineffective primary health care systems. Leveraging a network of expertise across the Harvard-Brigham system, Ariadne Labs’ designs, tests, and spreads simple solutions to address failures in health care delivery worldwide.”

Here’s what Ariadne Labs lists as its more prominent innovations:

• The Surgical Safety Checklist, developed in collaboration with the World Health Organization, shown to reduce post-surgical deaths and complications by 47 percent worldwide.
• OR Crisis Checklists, a compendium of 12 checklists to guide surgical teams through critical lifesaving steps when sudden emergencies occur in the OR. In simulation testing, Ariadne Labs demonstrated that when the checklists are not used, clinical teams completed only 77 percent of lifesaving steps in an emergency. When the teams used the checklists, they completed nearly 100 percent of lifesaving steps.
• The Safe Childbirth Checklist, developed with the World Health Organization to address the major causes of maternal and neonatal mortality. Implemented with Ariadne Labs BetterBirth Program of peer-to-peer coaching, the intervention has demonstrated significant improvement in the quality of care during labor and delivery in low-resource settings.
• The Delivery Decisions Team Birth Project, a solution package aimed at reducing C-section rates in the U.S. by improving communication between clinicians and laboring women, defining the basic care women in labor should receive and prioritizing women’s preferences for care. The project is being tested with tens of thousands of patients across the United States.
• The Serious Illness Conversation Guide, a structured tool to help clinicians and patients have meaningful conversations about what matters most to patients. The guide is the centerpiece of the Serious lllness Care Program, a systems-level intervention to ensure that all patients with serious illness receive care that aligns with their goals and values.
• The Primary Health Care Vital Signs, a global data resource for measuring and monitoring the strength of primary care systems in countries around the world, developed with the World Bank, WHO, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the global Primary Health Care Performance Initiative.

We’ll all stay tuned to see what happens next on Planet Gawande.