50 Most Influential Physician Executives – 2016
Rank: 17
Atul Gawande
Surgeon, professor, writer, researcher, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health
One word to describe Dr. Atul Gawande is busy. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and serves as a professor at both Harvard School of Public Health's department of health policy and management and in the department of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He's also been a New Yorker staff writer since 1998 and is a frequent speaker and lecturer. He has authored several best-sellers'Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, published in 2002; Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, published in 2007; The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, released in 2009; and his most recent, Being Mortal, published in 2014. Gawande, 50, also is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center between the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's for health systems innovation, and he serves as chairman of the not-for-profit Lifebox, an organization that works to make surgery safer around the world.