“Haven worked best as an incubator of ideas, a place to pilot, test and learn — and a way to share best practices across our companies,” Mr. Dimon added.
Business & Economy
Haven named Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon affiliated with Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital who also writes for The New Yorker, as chief executive to much fanfare. At the time, Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, acknowledged the high degree of difficulty of Haven’s mission.
“Success is going to require an expert’s knowledge, a beginner’s mind and a long-term orientation,” he said.
But since then, there have been few public signs of what Haven was doing. And in May, as the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation, Dr. Gawande stepped down as chief executive and became board chairman. Haven said it planned to search for a new chief executive, though it never hired one.
Health care costs and delivery have been a major concern for all three companies, but most notably Amazon, which has embarked on a hiring spree without equal. The online retailer, which declined to comment on Haven’s closing, has been piloting its own primary care clinics for workers in its warehouses. It said this summer that it expected to start with 20 clinics in five cities where it has large operations, providing access to care for more than 115,000 warehouse workers.
Some of the ideas Haven’s employees generated were tested by the three companies, according to one of the people familiar with the collaboration. JPMorgan, for instance, tested telemedicine options — which became much more popular after the coronavirus pandemic forced the country into lockdown last spring — for employees in Ohio and Arizona, the two states where it has the most employees outside of New York.
The bank also tested a program that let employees assess the cost of a test or doctor’s visit before it occurred, so they could better prepare to pay their medical bills, the person said.