Ariadne Labs, a joint health system innovation center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has named Asaf Bitton, M.D., a Harvard professor and Brigham and Women’s Hospital primary care physician, its new executive director, succeeding Atul Gawande, M.D., who was chosen to lead Haven, the new company set up by Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway.
Ariadne Labs was named for the Greek goddess who showed Theseus the way out of the Minotaur’s maze with a simple thread. It has grown from startup five years ago to five initiatives and 100 faculty and 110 staff. Its programs target surgery, serious illness and maternal health.
“Asaf is the ideal next leader for Ariadne Labs. He has a big heart, big ideas, and demonstrated capacity for big impact,” said Gawande, in a prepared statement.
A public health expert whose research spans international tobacco control policy and the global burden of chronic disease to U.S. healthcare payment reform, Bitton, 41, has been the director of the Ariadne Labs Primary Health Care Program since 2014. In that role, he has been a leader of the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative, launched in 2015 at the United Nations by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the World Health Organization with Ariadne Labs to strengthen primary health care systems worldwide.
Bitton also has collaborated with international health leaders to build novel health system innovations in Estonia, China and Ghana, and is a technical leader for a global Joint Learning Network of 10 countries working to strengthen integrated health care service delivery. He has served as a senior advisor to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation since 2012, developing a national demonstration project to transform care delivery and payment models. Today, it has expanded into Medicare’s largest primary care initiative, known as Comprehensive Primary Care Plus, with 13,000 clinicians in nearly 3000 practices serving 15 million patients across 18 regions in the United States.
In an interview posted on the Ariadne Labs website, Bitton said Ariadne Labs is making a transition. “We have learned that we can act successfully at these critical moments in health care practice, but if the larger systems are fragmented or dysfunctional, we also need to expose that and provide solutions that act in concert,” he said. “We are building on Atul’s vision. As a primary care physician trained and oriented toward populations and systems, I will take on this mantle and expand it. We can bring this systems lens to the new challenges that have emerged in order to continue to advance our goal of reducing suffering.”
Bitton was asked about Ariadne’s biggest challenge now. “Our largest challenge is maintaining the ability to keep going for the big targets that are most important,” he said. “Taking on huge challenges and innovative risk in a way that maintains rigor so we learn from things that don’t work. We are best when we combine rigorous methods and a deep purpose with execution at scale.”
