Atul Gawande, MD, MPH

Professor, Harvard Medical School. Renowned surgeon and researcher. Author, Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto.

The physician’s physician — the definitive voice on improving healthcare.

Atul Gawande’s bold visions for improving performance and safety in healthcare have made him one of the most sought-after speakers in medicine. His three books, Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto, have all been highly praised inside and outside the medical community. His new book is Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. TIME placed him among the world’s 100 most influential thinkers.

Atul Gawande is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship winner, a New Yorker columnist, an author — but, most of all, a physician, with a practitioner’s grasp of the everyday challenges of healthcare delivery.

Atul explains that medical practice and philosophy has not kept pace with the changes in healthcare over the last hundred years. We need reform — and Atul is on a lifelong search to discover what shape that reform should take. What does an effective healthcare system look like in the 21st century? How can we improve quality, manage risk, and measure performance more effectively? Atul brings an eloquence and an intellect to these questions that allow him to offer deeply considered and beautifully expressed solutions with implications for healthcare and beyond.

Dr. Gawande is broadly known for his influential articles, two of which won him the National Magazine Award. He has written about the shift from lone-ranger physicians to teams of co-operating specialists, and the new values this shift requires. He popularized the checklist as a means of co-ordinating complex work in hospitals. His ideas about how to rein in healthcare costs while increasing efficiency and quality have transformed the national discussion of these issues. His writing sets itself apart by its depth of thought and research, but also by its willingness to look outside of healthcare and see how other fields have delivered high-quality service in complex industries.

Atul is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and a professor in both the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is the Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit making surgery safer globally. He has won AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on health care, and the Lewis Thomas Award for Writing about Science.