Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway have picked the CEO to run their joint health venture

Jenny Cheng/Business Insider

• JPMorgan, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway have selected a CEO to run their new healthcare venture. 
• The trio of employers have selected Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and a professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.
• The venture, announced in January, is aimed at lowering healthcare costs for the companies' employees, though there haven't been many details about what that looks like.

The healthcare venture JPMorgan, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway announced back in January finally has a CEO.

The trio of employers have selected Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and a professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, they said in a news release. The venture will be based in Boston. 

The venture, announced in January, is aimed at lowering healthcare costs for the companies' employees, though there haven't been many details about what that looks like.

Gawande, in addition to practicing general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is a staff writer for The New Yorker. 

"This work will take time but must be done. The system is broken, and better is possible," Gawande said in a news release. 

The three companies are self-insured employers, which means that when you're an employee going to a doctor's appointment, your employer is ultimately footing the bill for the MRI you receive, rather than a health insurer.

"We're already the insurance company, we're already making these decisions, and we simply want do a better job," JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Business Insider in February. 

The venture will be geared toward employees of the three companies, rather than healthcare consumers overall in the US, though Dimon said that potentially, all Americans could benefit.

"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," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "Atul embodies all three, and we're starting strong as we move forward in this challenging and worthwhile endeavor."

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