Surgeon, bestselling author and MacArthur Foundation "genius" Atul Gawande has been selected to lead the joint health-care venture formed by Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to tackle rising health-care costs, the companies announced Wednesday.

"I'm thrilled to be named CEO of this health-care initiative," Gawande, who starts on July 9, said in a statement. "I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better health-care delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the U.S. and across the world.

"Now I have the backing of these remarkable organizations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all. This work will take time but must be done," he said. "The system is broken, and better is possible."

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have not yet rolled out an exact plan for the company or given it a name, but their goal is to lower health-care costs for employers while also improving treatment outcomes.

Gawande has been one of America's foremost authorities on health-care for years. He is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, and he practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He's also the founder and executive director of Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center.

His bestselling books include "Being Mortal" and "The Checklist Manifesto," and he is a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine.