The joint health venture from Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase now has an official name—Haven.
Officials, on March 6, announced the initiative’s new name while launching its new website at www.havenhealthcare.com. “We want to change the way people experience healthcare so that it is simpler, better, and lower cost,” Haven CEO Atul Gawande, M.D., said in a statement. “We’ll start small, learn from the experience of patients, and continue to expand to meet their needs.”
In January 2018, the three companies announced the joint healthcare venture, at which time they said the core focus would be partnering on ways to address healthcare for their U.S. employees, with the aim of improving employee satisfaction and reducing costs.
More details behind the initiative have been kept under wraps for the most part, although recently, that has begun to change. According to a Feb. 20 report in Morningstar, the group’s chief operating officer, Jack Stoddard, “revealed in newly unsealed court testimony that the venture is focusing on the complexity of health insurance and asking if it can ‘reinvent what insurance looks like in terms of benefit design?’” Stoddard added, per that report, “Workers are often confused about what their plans cover.”
To this end, in recent months, Gawande has been meeting with Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase employees to understand their healthcare experiences, according to the Haven announcement this week.
In a letter posted on the new website, Gawande wrote that Haven will be an “advocate for the patient and an ally to anyone—clinicians, industry leaders, innovators, policymakers and others—who makes patient care and cost better.” The website also outlines a number of areas to improve upon the current health system, including the difficulty people have accessing care, navigating the complex system, and affording their medical treatments and prescription drugs.
Gawande assumed the helm as CEO last July and his leadership team includes Stoddard as COO, Serkan Kutan as CTO, Dana Safran as head of measurement, as well as others. As Haven scales up its operations, the organization is focused on recruiting a range of individuals, including software engineers, data scientists, and clinicians to join its team. The company is headquartered in Boston and also has an office in New York, officials noted.
“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,” said Gawande.
