Buffett, Bezos, Dimon find health care CEO in Harvard professor

The health care brainchild of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett officially has a chief executive.

The power trio announced on Wednesday that Dr. Atul Gawande, Ariadne Labs founder and renowned surgeon, will lead their new health care project beginning July 9.

“We said at the outset that the degree of difficulty is high and success is going to require an expert’s knowledge, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation,” Bezos said in a statement. “Atul embodies all three, and we’re starting strong as we move forward in this challenging and worthwhile endeavor.”

Gawande is a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where the health care company will be headquartered. He is a New York Times bestselling author and a writer for The New Yorker. He is also a professor of public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.

Gawande will continue to perform general and endocrine surgery during his tenure as CEO.

Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway announced in February that they were teaming up to form a health care company that aims to increase transparency and cut costs for their employees.

It is unclear at this point how exactly the three prominent business executives plan to lower health care costs, though once they have a model in place, Buffett has said he would potentially like to use it on a wider scale across the country.

Dimon told CNBC earlier this month that this will be a long-term project and that the three companies are “not looking for immediate success.”

One of the big influences the prominent U.S. corporate giants could have in the health care market is pricing leverage. They will theoretically be able to negotiate discounted rates directly with drugmakers on behalf of their massive collective network, cutting out middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers.