Meet Haven, Amazon’s Shared Healthcare Initiative

Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway have finally revealed the name for their joint healthcare initiative: “Haven.”

“We want to change the way people experience healthcare so that it is simpler, better and lower cost,” Dr. Atul Gawande, Haven’s CEO, said in a statement on Wednesday (March 6), according to CNBC. “We’ll start small, learn from the experience of patients, and continue to expand to meet their needs.”

Last year, Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway announced they were teaming up to create an independent healthcare company that will aim to fix the nation’s healthcare system, focusing on reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction. In June it hired Gawande, a well-regarded surgeon and author, as its CEO.

The company also showed off a website with more details about the venture, including a number of areas of focus such as helping to make navigating the healthcare system easier, as well as accessing affordable treatments and prescription drugs.

The website also announced that Haven wants to work with clinicians and insurance companies to improve the overall healthcare system, and that the venture is open to working with existing players such as insurers, providers and pharmacy benefit managers instead of uprooting them.

The website also includes a letter where Gawande explains that the company knows tackling the issues with healthcare will “take time, and we’ll need the help of others, but we will tackle problems step-by-step and make sure that patients remain our top priority.”

He also outlined Haven’s guiding principles, which include being an advocate for the patient, as well as for the clinicians, industry leaders, innovators, policymakers and others who are trying to make patient care and costs better;
creating new solutions to change systems, technologies, contracts, policy and whatever else impacts better health care; and insuring that Haven’s work “has high impact and is sustainable.”