TOP 100 MAGAZINE

Jonathan Gerber

​​

Jonathan Gerber did not expect to become a founder at fifty. After more than three decades in executive-level roles for hospitals, MSOs, medical groups, IPAs, and health plans, he had built a career improving operational efficiency and productivity through KPI tracking and benchmarking. He had served as Med-Group administrator and COO for multiple healthcare-related companies, following earlier chapters as a Navy and Fleet Marine corpsman during Vietnam, a stockbroker, and later the COO of Adventist Health Medical Groups in Glendale California. His academic credentials—MBA in finance, RN, and BS—rounded out a profile of someone who understood both the clinical and business sides of healthcare.

 

What started on a lark became an enterprise. In 2004, Jon founded The Medcor Group, Inc., an end-to-end revenue cycle management company that provides billing, credentialing, and coding services for federally qualified health centers across the United States. The company was bootstrapped from nothing and today exceeds 200 employees, operates in over fifteen states, and generates more than $18 million in recurring annual revenue. Jon’s specialties—innovation, RPA and bot technology, agentic AI, automation, metrics, and data analytics—have shaped MedCor’s evolution and supported its growth. The company is fully remote, with teams in the U.S. and India, and continues to scale approximately 30% year over year.

 

Jon, what inspired you to start MedCor?

 

Necessity. I was laid off. I had been the CEO of AdventHealth’s medical groups for ten years, running the largest medical group for Adventist Health in Southern California. When I was terminated, I began consulting on business evaluations for hospitals, mergers, and acquisitions. Ironically, the same hospital that let me go hired me to evaluate a clinic they wanted to acquire. I did 20 or 30 of those evaluations in the first two years. We discovered a pattern: billing operations were leaving a lot of money on the table. Adventist Health and Catholic Healthcare West asked, “Can you take over the billing?” I told them I didn’t know anything about medical billing, but we were great operators. They gave me their billing operation, and I hired people who were more astute at billing than I was.

 

We were doing a couple million a year within a short period of time. Then I ran it into the ground. I lost everything—my house, my car. I bought a trailer with my last $10,000 and lived at Disneyland Park with other homeless people. One day sitting outside, I said, “You’ve got to change your life.” I went through my Rolodex, found fifty names, and called every one asking for a referral. I got one. They asked if I knew federal qualified health care billing. I said yes—I didn’t. But I learned it, built it, and started with federally qualified health centers. Today we’re in 15 states with more than 200 employees.

 

Do you think that major setback made you build a better company the second time?

Absolutely. Failure—if you learn from it—makes you better. And this was a resounding failure. You couldn’t get any worse. It forced me to get focused. In corporate life, you can make good money, but you don’t own anything. When you own the company, you’re responsible for people’s paychecks: their house, car, childcare. If you take that seriously, you look at everything differently. I started asking, “What’s our competition doing?” I found the number one company in our market space and tracked them down at every event in every state they exhibited. We followed their business, learned from their model, and tried a lot of things. We failed plenty, but when we hit the ten-year mark, the business began to drive itself.

 

You have to surround yourself with really good talent who are committed to the same vision. We were also early in automation. While others used boots on the ground, we built our own RPA and bot technology. It cost a fortune and took three years to break even, but now it’s increased our margins substantially. We stopped diversifying. We only do federally qualified health centers. That one thing is what we’re known for.

 

What makes MedCor unique?

Relationships. We surround our clients with high-touch support and a lot of handholding. Even if there’s a large billing team on the ground, the key is the one-to-one relationships we maintain at the C-level and director level. We become part of their team. We never want to be seen as a vendor—the Culligan man who replaces the water. We’re involved in their problems, solutions, and decision-making. Recently, a client had a massive issue and asked us to drive revenue in a specific direction. We brought together our admin and technology teams and created a multifaceted solution. We’re solution-driven and personally connected. Some of our clients are the largest federally qualified health centers in the U.S. We dominate New York in that space.

 

What’s on the horizon for MedCor?

Technology that serves us. Technology should create efficiency, extrapolate data, and provide insight and actionable outcomes. It has to increase yield and margin—for us and for our clients. We’re pushing into autonomous coding. It’s essentially generative AI doing 70–80% of physician coding with about 99% accuracy. Coding is a massive pain point for doctors and incredibly labor intensive. This will be the next wave across the country.

 

What do you enjoy most about your work?

When a client comes to us with a problem they can’t fix, and we build a team that improves their efficiency, accuracy, and revenue. These federally qualified health centers serve the underserved. Helping them do that makes me extraordinarily happy. I’m also proud that we’ve built a company that takes care of our people and helps them grow. After losing everything once, I know how important stability is. Being able to provide that for hundreds of families is deeply gratifying.

 

 

 

Jonathan Gerber
Founder/CEO
The Medcor Group, Inc.
Website: www.medcorinc.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jonathangerber