Atul Gawande


Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally. On June 20, 2018, Dr. Gawande was named the CEO of healthcare venture Haven, owned by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase and stepped down as CEO in May 2020.
He has written extensively on medicine and public health for The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of the books ; Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance; The Checklist Manifesto; and .

Early years and education

Gawande was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Indian immigrants to the United States, both doctors. His family soon moved to Athens, Ohio, where he and his sister grew up, and he graduated from Athens High School in 1983.
Gawande earned a bachelor's degree in biology and political science from Stanford University in 1987. As a Rhodes Scholar, he earned an M.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford in 1989. He graduated with a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1995, and earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1999. He completed his general surgical residency training, again at Harvard, in 2003.

Political career

As an undergraduate, Gawande was a volunteer for Gary Hart's campaign. After graduating, he joined Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign. He worked as a health-care researcher for Rep. Jim Cooper, who was author of a "managed competition" health care proposal for the Conservative Democratic Forum. He entered medical school in 1990 – leaving after two years to become Bill Clinton's healthcare lieutenant during the 1992 campaign. He later became a senior advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services after Clinton's inauguration. He directed one of the three committees of the Clinton Health Care Task Force, supervising 75 people and defined the benefits packages for Americans and subsidies and requirements for employers. He returned to medical school in 1993 and earned a medical degree in 1995.

Journalism

Soon after he began his residency, his friend Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, asked him to contribute to the online magazine. His pieces on the life of a surgical resident caught the eye of The New Yorker, which published several pieces by him before making him a staff writer in 1998.
A June 2009 New Yorker essay by Gawande compared the health care of two towns in Texas to show why health care was more expensive in one town compared to the other. Using the town of McAllen, Texas, as an example, it argued that a corporate, profit-maximizing culture was an important factor in driving up costs, unlike a culture of low-cost high-quality care as provided by the Mayo Clinic and other efficient health systems.
The article "made waves" and was cited by President Barack Obama during Obama's attempt to get health care reform legislation passed by the United States Congress. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the article "affected thinking dramatically", and was shown to a group of senators by Obama, who effectively said, "This is what we've got to fix." After reading the New Yorker article, Warren Buffett's long-time business partner Charlie Munger mailed a check to Gawande in the amount of $20,000 as a thank-you to Dr. Gawande for providing something so socially useful. Gawande returned the check and was subsequently sent a new check for $40,000. Gawande donated the $40,000 to the Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health.
In addition to his popular writing, Gawande has published studies on topics including military surgery techniques and error in medicine, included in the New England Journal of Medicine. He is the director of the World Health Organization's Global Patient Safety Challenge. His essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2003, The Best American Science Writing 2002, The Best American Science Writing 2009 and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011.
In 2012, he gave the TED talk "How Do We Heal Medicine?". The talk has been viewed over 1.9 million times.

Books

Gawande published his first book, ', in 2002. It was a National Book Award finalist, and has been published in over one hundred countries.
His second book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, was released in April 2007. It discusses three virtues that Gawande considers to be most important for success in medicine: diligence, doing right, and ingenuity. Gawande offers examples in the book of people who have embodied these virtues. The book strives to present multiple sides of contentious medical issues, such as malpractice law in the US, physicians' role in capital punishment, and treatment variation between hospitals.
Gawande released his third book, ', in 2009. It discusses the importance of organization and pre-planning in both medicine and the larger world. The Checklist Manifesto reached the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list in 2010.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End was released in October 2014 and became a #1 New York Times bestseller. It discusses end of life choices about assisted living and the effect of medical procedures on terminally ill people. It challenges many traditionally held notions about the role of medicine. The book was the basis of a documentary for the PBS television series "Frontline" and was first broadcast on February 10, 2015.

Later career

In June 2018, he was named the CEO for the new, Boston-based company, Haven Healthcare, formed by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. He stepped down from the position in May 2020.

Awards and honors

In 2004, he was named one of the 20 Most Influential South Asians by Newsweek. In the 2010 Time 100, he was included in Thinkers Category. The same year, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.
In 2006, Gawande was named a MacArthur Fellow for his work investigating and articulating modern surgical practices and medical ethics. In 2007, he became director of the World Health Organization's effort to reduce surgical deaths, and in 2009 he was elected a Hastings Center Fellow.
In 2014, he presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, delivering a series of four talks titled The Future of Medicine. These were delivered in Boston, London, Edinburgh and Delhi.
He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth's Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, and the Lewis Thomas Prize for writing about science.
In November 2016, he was one of three recipients of the prestigious Massachusetts Governor's Award in the Humanities for his contributions to improving civic life in Massachusetts.
In 2019, he was named as fifty-first among the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare by Modern Healthcare.

Interviews and talks