Kevin Lamarque/Reuters; Yuri Gripas/Reuters; Mark Wilson/Getty Images
- Haven, the joint health venture struck up by Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway, is shutting down, the company announced on Monday.
- First reported by CNBC, Haven told employees on Monday that it would disband by the end of February.
- The venture struggled to get ideas off the ground and maintain buy-in from founding company Amazon.
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Haven is shutting down.
The company told employees on Monday that it will disband by the end of next month, CBNC reported.
“In the past three years, Haven explored a wide range of healthcare solutions, as well as piloted new ways to make primary care easier to access, insurance benefits simpler to understand and easier to use, and prescription drugs more affordable,” Haven said in a statement on its website.
Haven began in 2018, when Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway got together to solve the rising cost of healthcare in the US. At the time of its announcement, Warren Buffet memorably said that the ballooning costs of healthcare act as a “hungry tapeworm” on the economy.
Haven was supposed to use the combined companies’ resources to get costs under control and improve care for the member companies’ employee populations, but it struggled to find an identity.
It began by tackling primary care pilots that it couldn’t market widely to employees in an effort to maintain secrecy, The Information’s Paris Martineau reported in July.
The pilot connected employees to primary care teams, similar to Amazon’s app and service Amazon Care. Amazon Care, as Business Insider reported, was underway at the tech giant before Haven got started.
Haven lost financial backing, The Information reported, as well as key leaders like Dr. Atul Gawande, the former CEO. Tensions escalated between Haven and the founding companies as the upstart struggled to come up with ideas quickly, and Amazon in particular has been the most reluctant to make commitments to Haven, according to The Information and a person close to Amazon.
“Haven will end its operations at the end of February,” Brooke Thurston, a spokesperson for Haven, told Business Insider in an email.
The three founding companies will continue to work together informally to design new healthcare programs meant for the specific needs of their own employee populations, Thurston said.
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