Dr. Atul Gawande has experienced many first days throughout his career. Monday may be his biggest yet. Gawande is slated to formally start as chief executive officer of the joint health-care venture between J.P. Morgan, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway. The trio's CEOs, Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett, announced in January that they would form a new nonprofit company aimed at lowering health-care costs for their combined roughly 1.2 million employees and possibly one day all Americans. Gawande has written and spoken extensively about inefficiencies in the current system. He will now be tasked with finding ways to fix them. It's a daunting assignment, but colleagues say Buffett, Bezos and Dimon chose the right person. They describe him as someone who's brilliant yet modest. They say he genuinely wants to understand people and improve the world around him. "I can't think of anybody who'd be better. I don't know of anybody who'd be better," said Dr. Arnold Epstein of Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Epstein is chair of the department of health policy and management at the school of public health, where Gawande teaches.

A well-known author and speaker

Gawande, 52, is a professor in the department of health policy and management at the school of public health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He's a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where the new company will be based. Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, chief of the division of surgical oncology at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center, has known Gawande for nearly two decades. She taught him when he was training to become a surgeon and immediately saw his interest in people, his desire to understand their points of view and his ability to communicate them. "No matter what he's doing, whether being an educator, a surgeon or running a program, he pays attention in everything he does, who he's there to help and serve. That really shines through everything he does. It's about the people and what they need," said Bertagnolli, who's now one of Gawande's colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard. Some know Gawande best for his writing. He's penned four best-selling books: "Complications," "Better," "The Checklist Manifesto" and "Being Mortal." He has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Gawande's 2009 New Yorker article "The Cost Conundrum" examined why some health-care markets are more expensive than others. He focused on McAllen, Texas, where he found "across-the-board overuse of medicine" was the primary cause of it being one of the most expensive health-care markets at the time. Buffett's longtime investing partner Charlie Munger gave Gawande $20,000 after reading the piece because it was "so useful socially," Buffett in 2010. Gawande told STAT News last month that the article "opened the door" for him being named to lead the new venture. In the decade since he wrote the article, Gawande has continued tracking how unnecessary medical care hurts patients physically and financially. Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy at Harvard, said the story shows Gawande's level of interest and curiosity in the world. "I think he's a very good, curious person," she said. "More so than others."

A lesser-known innovator