suffering and save lives at large scale.
Now,
Atul Gawande
For more than two decades, surgeon, writer,
and public health leader Atul Gawande has
straddled the intersection of direct patient
care and population-level impact, asking a
fundamental question: How do we fix health
care systems to deliver better care for every
person everywhere? With his insistence that
solutions must be simple, affordable, and
scalable across diverse settings, Gawande is
widely recognized1 for leading the
development of system innovations 2 that
have improved care for hundreds of millions
of patients globally. Through Ariadne
Labs3, the center he founded at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H.
Chan School of Public Health, Gawande
and his team have fostered a new discipline
of health systems innovation to reduce
1
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/awards?id=
3203870&module=900
2
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/atul-
gawande/
3
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/
as the CEO of the Amazon, Berkshire
Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase health
organization, he is developing scalable
solutions for health care delivery
demonstrated to achieve better outcomes,
more satisfaction, and greater cost
efficiency with their population of more
than one million employees and family
members. At the heart of his work is a
commitment to the highest principle of
medicine: All people have lives of equal
worth4.
The son of Indian immigrant physicians,
Gawande grew up in Athens, Ohio.
Following degrees at Stanford and Oxford,
he developed his interest in health care
policy as a Congressional staff member,
ultimately becoming chief health and
social policy director for the 1992
Clinton/Gore campaign. After a year with
the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful
effort at health reform, he returned to
complete his medical degree at Harvard.
During surgical training at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital, he began writing for
Slate magazine about the breakdowns he
observed firsthand in the health care
system affecting the lives of patients and
their families.
He became a staff writer at The New
Yorker5 while still in surgical residency
and ultimately author of four New York
Times bestselling books. Gawande wrote
4
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-
desk/curiosity-and-the-prisoner
5
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/atul-
gawande
about what he saw – that despite
tremendous advancements in medical
science, patients and their families suffer
every day as a result of preventable errors
in medical practice6, unnecessary medical
procedures7, and crippling health care
costs8 – and possible solutions, as well. His
essays have stimulated broad public
dialogue about issues ranging from the
need to invest in stronger primary health
care systems9 to whether health care is a
right10.
In a 2010 New Yorker essay titled Letting
Go11, Gawande asked, What should
medicine do when it can’t save your life?
That question led Gawande to write Being
Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the
End, a 2014 book that is still on the New
York Times bestseller list today and
upended the claim that standardizing
conversations between clinicians and
seriously ill patients about their goals and
values amounts to “death panels.” With his
accompanying, Emmy-nominated PBS
documentary12, the launch of the Serious
6
http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-
manifesto/
7 harmful, and costly surgical errors:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/1
1/overkill-atul-gawande
8
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/0
1/the-cost-conundrum
9 To advance surgical safety in low-
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/2
3/the-heroism-of-incremental-care
10
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/0
2/is-health-care-a-right
11
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/0
2/letting-go-2
12
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/being-
mortal/
Illness Care Program13 at Ariadne Labs, and
the co-founding of the Massachusetts
Coalition for Serious Illness Care 14,
Gawande played an important role in
transforming national understanding of how
to better care for individuals facing serious
illness. In 2016 testimony15 before the U.S.
Senate Special Committee on Aging,
Gawande outlined a set of national
recommendations to ensure that all
Americans facing serious illness receive
care that honors personal goals and
priorities.
Through his clinical practice, his writing
and public health research, Gawande
distilled a pivotal insight: The fundamental
disease of health care systems is lack of
execution. The cause is complexity. The
solution is health systems innovation. To
drive solutions, Gawande has launched
several start-ups and built supporting
coalitions across the health care,
technology, and other business sectors. He
helped design sponge-tracking technology,
now sold as the SurgiCount Safety-Sponge
System, that has eliminated for hospitals
nationwide one of the most persistent,
forgetting sponges in patients during
procedures.
13
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/areas-of-
work/serious-illness-care/
14
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/11/
wishes-for-end-life-care-often-ignored-survey-
finds/Pna4jQN3V1MqxYKTJWLFaP/story.html
15
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/2016/06/23/read-
dr-atul-gawandes-testimony-before-u-s-senate-
special-committee-aging-on-serious-illness/
resource settings worldwide, Gawande
founded Lifebox16, a non-profit for safer
surgery globally that used market
mechanisms to lower costs of safety
monitoring equipment for low-income
countries by 80 percent. Lifebox has
built a network of professionals who
have trained more than 6,000 anesthesia
providers in these settings and
safeguarded care for more than 10
million people so far.
In 2012, Gawande became the founding
executive director of Ariadne Labs 17, the
Boston-based center he built from a start-up
research center into a globally recognized
leader of health systems innovation with
100 employees and more than 100 affiliate
and associate faculty members across the
Harvard system, and $20 million in annual
revenue. Gawande and his team at Ariadne
have designed and tested solutions to some
of the most complex problems in health care
including a Surgical Safety Checklist 18 and
OR Crisis Checklists19 to prevent life-
threatening errors in surgery, a Safe
Childbirth Checklist and BetterBirth
Program20 to address the causes of maternal
and neonatal mortality, a Serious Illness
Conversation Guide and Program21 to
improve care for those with serious illness.
16
https://www.lifebox.org/
17
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/resources/articles/n
ews/ariadne-labs-year-5-story/
18
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/areas-of-
work/safe-surgery-checklist/
19
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/areas-of-
work/surgery-or-crisis-checklists/
20
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/areas-of-
work/better-birth/
21
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/areas-of-
work/serious-illness-care/
The work is carried out through
collaborations with major U.S. health
systems, national governments worldwide,
the World Bank, the World Health
Organization, global foundations, and health
and technology industry leaders. Ariadne
Labs tools and solutions have spread22 to
nearly every corner of the globe and
touched the lives of hundreds of millions of
patients.
Ariadne Labs became a founding member
of the Primary Health Care Performance
Initiative, launched23 at the United
National General Assembly in 2015 with
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The
World Bank, and The World Health
Organization. As a member of the PHCPI
steering committee, Gawande is helping
to build international cooperation and the
creation of new tools for monitoring and
improving systems of primary care
globally.
At the same time, Gawande has led
teams that created simple, scalable tools
that rapidly changed medical practice
nationally and globally during critical
moments: the CDC Hospital Worker
Checklist during the 2014 Ebola Virus
Outbreak24 , the CDC Checklist for
Prescribing Opioids in Chronic Pain 25,
and the WHO Patient Care Checklist for
22
https://www.ariadnelabs.org/reach/
23
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/world/afri
ca/partnership-aims-to-bolster-local-health-care-
providers.html
24
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/25712
25
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/pdf/PDO_Ch
ecklist-a.pdf
the 2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu) Epidemic 26. Four things to know about
Most recently, in July 2018, Gawande
Atul Gawande
became27 the CEO of the Amazon,
Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase
health care organization, also based in
Boston, and transitioned to chairman of
Ariadne Labs. With the support of these
three companies, he is working to improve
care delivery for their employees and their
families in ways that incubate better
models of care for all. This organization is
independent and not profit-seeking, and he
will continue in his roles as surgeon, writer,
and professor. At the helm of this
significant joint venture, Gawande
continues to devote himself to building ■ He is an award-winning author
scalable solutions for better health care
delivery in the U.S. and across the world.
He has written several New York
Gawande lives with his wife of
twenty-five years in Newton, MA. Times bestsellers, “Complications: A
They have three children. Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect
Science,” which was a finalist for a
National Book Award in 2002;
“Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on
Performance;” “The Checklist
Manifesto: How to Get Things
Right;” and most recently, “Being
Mortal: Medicine and What Matters
in the End.”28

He has also fascinated readers of the

New Yorker as a staff writer since
1998 and writes for other
publications. 29 He told the Globe in

28

26
https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/
swineflu/patient_care_checklist/en/
27
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201
80620005747/en/Amazon-Berkshire-Hathaway-
JPMorgan-Chase-appoint-Dr
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2014/1
0/11/book-review-being-mortal-medicine-and-
what-matters-end-atul-
gawande/JwyaLEIAGOs5guUGBiG2YN/story.ht
ml
29
http://atulgawande.com/articles/
201430 that he had been surprised by
his success as a writer. “When I got
the call telling me I was nominated
for the National Book Award, I was
going into the operating room. I felt
like my world had changed, and I
couldn’t explain it to anybody. After
the book, I realized that this was as
much what I do as my life as a
surgeon,” he said.
■ He is a doctor and public health
researcher
He practices general and endocrine
surgery at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital. 31 He also is a professor in the
Department of Health Policy and
Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health, and a professor of
surgery at Harvard Medical School.
His public health research has focused on
the intersection of surgery and public health,
much of it examining “errors in surgery,
establishing its frequency and seriousness
and revealing underlying mechanisms,”
according to the Chan School website 32.
■ He has been involved in health
care policy before — including
Hillary Clinton’s failed reform
effort in the 1990s
30
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2014/1
0/04/new-england-writers-work-atul-
gawande/hJsiwEf68inTr6sgaBQSaM/story.html
31
https://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.or
g/details/774/atul-gawande-endocrine_surgery-
gastrointestinal_and_general_surgery-boston
32
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/atul-gawande/
Gawande was raised in Athens, Ohio, and
went to Stanford University. He studied
philosophy and politics as a Rhodes Scholar
at Oxford.
In an interview with Medscape33, he recalled
his early years working in government and
“hopscotching” between those jobs and
medical school. He talked about working on
Al Gore’s campaign in 1988 and in Gore’s
Senate office, and working on health care
policy for a Tennessee congressman. He
eventually became a health care adviser to
candidate Bill Clinton in 1992.
“His task was to help flesh out Mr. Clinton’s
health plan and defend it from Republican
attacks,” the New York Times reported in
199434. Gawande was also a leader in the
health care reform task force headed by First
Lady Hillary Clinton. The task force’s
proposals went nowhere.
“Politics was not a major part of our task,”
Gawande, who by then had returned to
Harvard Medical School, explained to the
Times. “That was what the President and the
First Lady and their political advisers were
supposed to be dealing with. We were there
to pull together options for them.”
■ He has received numerous awards,
including a “genius” award
In 2006, Gawande, who was 40 at the time,
won a MacArthur Foundation “genius”
award. The foundation35 said he had
“applied a critical eye to surgical practices”
and scrutinized “the culture, protocol, and
technology of modern medical practice from
33
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/815241
_2
34
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/29/us/health
-care-debate-what-went-wrong-health-care-
campaign-collapsed-special-report.html
35
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/779/
the perspective of a dedicated and
empathetic professional. In all his published
work, he brings fresh and unique
perspective, clarity, and intuition to the
field.” He received a Governor’s Award in
the Humanities in 2016 in Massachusetts for
championing “humanism in healthcare”
through his work.