The Amazon-Berkshire-J.P. Morgan healthcare collaborative doesn’t have an official name yet, but is rapidly building out its staff and leadership team.
Serkan Kutan, a veteran of Microsoft, Amazon and Goldman Sachs – who most recently served as the chief technology officer for online appointment booking company ZocDoc – announced on Linkedin that he was joining the venture as its CTO.
In his post, Kutan called the venture “the most promising attempt to improve health care in the U.S” and highlighted the opportunity to work with CEO Atul Gawande and as a major motivation to take on the new position.
Kutan also highlighted the company’s hiring page, which lists a number of open positions across a range functions including enterprise IT, data science and finance.
“We owe it to our children to tackle this giant and the founders’ long-term, not-profit seeking approach is exactly what it will take to make a difference,” Kutan wrote.
It’s still as of yet unclear exactly how the healthcare collaborative plans to make that difference, but it’s leadership team has extensive experience in healthcare starting with Gawande and COO Jack Stoddard, a veteran of Accolade, Optum and Comcast.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Recently though, one of the venture’s hires came under scrutiny after Optum sued former employee David Smith to stop the new recruit from disclosing trade secrets to his new employer.
The court filings and subsequent legal proceedings started to peel back some of the layers of secrecy shielding the Amazon-Berkshire-J.P. Morgan healthcare collaboration.
In a response to the suit, Smith’s lawyers said that the Optum was confusing the organization’s efforts with Amazon’s own foray into healthcare and added that the venture “has no product or service that competes with Optum.”
While the collaboration is ostensibly a nonprofit primarily focused on serving the member companies’ roughly 1.2 million employees, there is concern from incumbents that it will eventually expand its ambitions to the rest of the healthcare system.
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