Dr. Richard Merkin

Biography

Building one of the country’s largest physician-owned networks — and supporting the research behind modern medicine.

Richard Merkin, M.D. is the CEO and founder of The Heritage Group, including Heritage Provider Network and Heritage Medical Systems. Under his stewardship, HPN has grown into one of the largest physician-owned and operated integrated delivery systems in the United States, with more than 50 related healthcare companies and medical groups operating in California, Arizona, and New York.

HPN and its affiliates bring more than four decades of coordinated managed care, with over 4,000 primary care physicians and 30,000 specialists. Heritage provides high-quality, cost-effective care to more than 800,000 individuals, including approximately 150,000 fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries — demonstrating that the Heritage model can work in virtually any setting.

The Heritage Group encompasses healthcare operations alongside intellectual-property, venture capital, private-equity, and insurance companies, plus joint ventures with retail and clinical partners including Rite Aid, Trinity Hospital Systems, Fresenius Medical Care, and Signature Medical Group in Missouri. Across all of those businesses, Dr. Merkin’s focus has remained constant: improving how medicine is delivered, accelerating the science behind better treatments, and expanding access for the patients who need it most.

After earning his M.D. at the University of Miami School of Medicine, Dr. Merkin founded what would become Heritage Provider Network in 1979 — building a physician-owned alternative to fee-for-service care decades before value-based care became an industry standard. The Heritage model has since proven adaptable across geographies and payer types, including approximately 150,000 fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries who don’t fit a traditional managed-care frame.

As co-founder of FasterCures (a center of the Milken Institute), Dr. Merkin has helped accelerate the development of treatments for prostate cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, and other diseases. FasterCures recently contributed to the tracking and development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. Through the Heritage Medical Research Institute, the Merkin Family Foundation, and direct giving, Dr. Merkin and his family support a broad portfolio of biomedical research, scientific education, and translational medicine — moving discoveries from the laboratory to the patient bedside at institutions including Caltech, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USC Keck, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, City of Hope, and others.

Inspired in part by the X-Prize Foundation, Dr. Merkin has also built a portfolio of incentivized prize challenges that mobilize global communities of problem-solvers around the toughest problems in healthcare. The $3 million Heritage Health Prize, launched in 2011, sought a fundamental breakthrough in predicting future hospitalizations — aimed at the country’s estimated $40 billion in avoidable hospitalizations. The Heritage Healthcare Innovation Awards (with Crain’s NY Business) honor metropolitan healthcare leaders; the FIRST LEGO League Global Innovation Award sponsors student innovation in robotics, science, and engineering; and the Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology, launched in 2022 with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, recognizes novel technologies that have significantly improved human health.