Richard Merkin is the CEO and founder of the Heritage Group. Under his stewardship, the Heritage Group has become the largest, physician-owned and -operated integrated delivery system in the United States with more than 50 related health-care companies. The Heritage Group encompasses numerous patent, venture capital, private equity, and insurance companies. Merkin serves on the board of the California Institute of Technology and the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC). He is a founding board member of FasterCures. He has established the Richard Merkin Foundation for Stem Cell Research at the Broad Institute at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Richard Merkin Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute, the Richard Merkin Foundation for Neural Regeneration at UCLA, and the Merkin Family Foundation Fund for Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at USC.  He is on the board of the California Nano Systems Institute and serves on many other boards that focus on science, health care, and finance. Inspired by the X-Prize Foundation, Merkin launched the Heritage Health Prize, a $3 million global incentivized competition seeking to achieve a fundamental breakthrough in our ability to predict future hospitalization. Merkin supports the Merkin initiative to study payment and clinician reform at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.