Retail Latin America: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan unveil new name for startup

Dr. Atul Gawande CEO of the yet-to-be-named Amazon-backed health care startup.

By Jessica Bartlett – Reporter, Boston Business Journal

Mar 6, 2019, 4:06pm EST Updated 3 hours ago

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase have named the joint health care startup announce more than a year ago, and unveiled a website with details about its intent.

The new company will be called Haven, and in a memo on Haven’s newly launched website, CEO Dr. Atul Gawande said the company’s guiding principles include being an advocate for patients and an ally to anyone — including clinicians, industry leaders, innovators, policymakers and more, who seek to make patient care better and lower costs.

The company also said it will create new solutions and change technologies, contracts policy and more in their efforts, in a “relentless” pursuit to make health care better.

“As a surgeon, I’ve devoted my career to caring for my patients and working to make the health care system better,” he wrote. “I believe all people deserve quality health care that is both affordable and accessible.”

The company says Gawande has been meeting with employees of the three companies in recent months, and has since identified a number of areas to improve the current health system. Those include fixing the difficulty patients have accessing care, navigating the complex system, and affording medical treatments and prescription drugs.

Haven will start there, pursuing what it calls “common-sense fixes” to make primary care easier to access, simplifying insurance benefits, and making prescription drugs more affordable. As most observers expected, the company plans to use data and technology in its efforts.

“The good news is the best results are not the most complicated or expensive. The right care in the right place is often more effective and less costly than what we get today,” Gawande said in a release.

The company, while based in Boston, is also announcing that it has an office in New York and is scaling up operations as it recruits software engineers, data scientists and clinicians. “We want to change the way people experience health care so that it is simpler, better, and lower cost,” Gawande said. “We’ll start small, learn from the experience of patients, and continue to expand to meet their needs.”

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The name “Haven” came from the company’s goal to be a “partner to individuals and families” while also working with clinicians to make the overall system better, the website says.

The company said it will focus on its U.S.-based employees and families of the three companies, which total 1.2 million people, before sharing its innovations and solutions with others. The company also won't be focused on profit, and will be an independent organization, but draw resources and expertise from, its founding companies.

"We’re able to focus on creating value for families, not shareholders, since we are free from profit-making incentives and constraints," the company said on its website. "The organization will reinvest any surplus back into our work to improve health outcomes, patient satisfaction, and lower costs for individuals and families."

While separate, executives of the three founding companies will sit on Haven's board, the company detailed. Todd Combs, an investment officer of Berkshire Hathaway, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, will sit on the board with Gawande.

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK) and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) have been working since January 2018 to launch a health care startup aimed at improving employee satisfaction in health care and reducing health care costs. Details about the company have been sparse, but the organization disclosed in June that it would be based out of Boston and led by Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon and New Yorker writer Gawande.

The startup has also been also hiring behind the scenes. the startup has been steadily hiring for its Boston-based office, announcing that it hired the former ZocDoc chief technology officer, Serkan Kutan, as its chief technology officer.