Zak Eisenberg is a Partner at Merritt Healthcare Advisors, a leading investment bank specializing in providing mergers and acquisitions advisory services to healthcare organizations such as physician-owned surgery centers, hospitals, and medical practices. Under his leadership and the firm’s founder-operator approach, Merritt Healthcare Advisors has rapidly grown to develop nearly four dozen healthcare facilities across the US, making it one of the top healthcare-focused investment banks in the nation. Zak’s diverse background includes founding an edtech startup in college, experience in venture capital and private equity, and advising on complex healthcare transactions.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [02:11] How launching a startup in China shaped Zak Eisenberg’s career
- [12:34] The secrets to breaking into healthcare investment banking
- [17:29] Why aging populations are reshaping global healthcare needs
- [18:55] The massive shift from hospital care to outpatient services
- [22:24] How preventative care trends are gaining economic traction fast
- [28:09] How AI is transforming diagnostics and reducing provider burnout
In this episode…
Healthcare isn’t just changing, it’s being quietly rebuilt from the inside out. As technology accelerates and costs climb, the question becomes harder to ignore: can the system evolve fast enough to keep up with the demands of an aging population?
According to Zak Eisenberg, a seasoned healthcare dealmaker and advisor to physician-led businesses, the answer lies in shifting how and where care is delivered. He explains that rising costs and demographic pressures are pushing healthcare away from hospitals and toward more efficient outpatient settings, while also emphasizing prevention over treatment. From ambulatory surgery centers replacing costly hospital visits to a growing focus on population health, the system is being reengineered to do more with less. The result is a transformation that could redefine both patient outcomes and the economics of care for decades to come.
In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran is joined by Zak Eisenberg, Partner at Merritt Healthcare Advisors, to discuss healthcare transformation and the disruptive power of AI. They explore demographic shifts driving demand, the rise of outpatient care models, and how AI is improving diagnostics and workflows. Zak also talks about navigating complex healthcare deals and managing long transaction timelines.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotable Moments:
- “Developed countries overall have a few similar trends. Their birth rates are going down and their population is aging.”
- “As populations age, they need more treatment, more health care, and that will affect private companies as well.”
- “Most surgeries now can be done in an outpatient setting called an ambulatory surgery center.”
- “Population health is the idea that preventing disease is a way to improve lives and reduce costs.”
- “The better and more accurate it gets, the more impact they’ll have on providers, which is good.”
Action Steps:
- Shift care to lower-cost outpatient settings: Moving procedures out of hospitals reduces expenses while maintaining quality and improving accessibility for patients.
- Prioritize preventative and population health strategies: Focusing on prevention lowers long-term healthcare costs and improves overall patient outcomes across entire populations.
- Leverage AI to reduce administrative burden: Automating documentation and workflows helps reduce provider burnout and allows clinicians to focus more on patient care.
- Stay adaptable during long transaction cycles: Healthcare deals can take months or years, so maintaining operational performance is critical for successful outcomes.
- Embrace data-driven decision-making in care delivery: Leveraging data and analytics enables more accurate diagnoses, improved efficiency, and stronger patient results.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:00
Today, we’re talking about how the healthcare industry is evolving and changing, and especially being impacted by all the changes that are happening in AI. My guest today is Zak Eisenberg. He’s with Merritt Healthcare, and I’ll tell you more about him in a second. So stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:15
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:32
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. You know, every week we have smart CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos. Lots of great episodes for you to check out. And of course, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast. You’re the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast. So if you want to learn more about that, you can go to rise25.com or email our team at support@rise25.com.
All right. My guest today is Zak Eisenberg. He’s a Partner at Merritt Healthcare Advisors. It’s one of the nation’s leading healthcare focused investment banks. So he really has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in healthcare today, which everyone we all have to deal with. So we all are curious about what’s happening, especially how it’s being affected by the changes in AI. And he specializes in advising physician owned surgery centers, hospitals, and practices on mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships. And he has a background in economics and international relations from Boston University.
Prior to Merritt, he had worked in venture capital and private equity. So he’s got quite a lot of background in this area. And Zak, I’m really excited to get into this topic with you because it’s an area that I’m curious about. And let’s start with, you actually had started an edtech company while you were in college, starting a company in your dorm room kind of situation. And it was preparing Chinese students to come to study in the US during college.
I’m curious, where did that idea come from? What inspired that?
Zak Eisenberg: 02:11
Well, first of all, John, thanks for having me on the podcast. You know, we took a little while to make this happen, but glad to have you and hope you can come on Merritt’s podcast at some point. Yeah, I started, I started that company in college with my roommate, which I guess is kind of a classic story. Yeah. At the time he was actually from China.
And at the time, you know, the number of Chinese students coming to study in the US was growing by, gosh, 30, 30 or 35% a year. And they were spending enormous amounts of money studying up on what it was like to get educated here in the US, because American education globally still and especially then in China, had an ambiance of, you know, real excellence. And so Chinese students, yes, they can go to Fudan University or Tsinghua or wherever else, but a lot of them wanted to go to Harvard or Boston University or MIU or UCLA, you know, really internationally focused schools that have a good brand abroad. And they spent enormous amounts of money working with Chinese students who had spent some time here on being educated, what it was like to be here. And so they would take very expensive, you know, air travel to come to the US.
And it wasn’t very attainable for most Chinese students. So we wanted to flip that on its head and bring it to China through technology. This was really when YouTube was starting to really grow edX and Coursera and a lot of these, you know, educational video sites were up and running.
John Corcoran: 04:04
This is the early 20 tens, time frame, 2011, 2012, that kind of time period.
Zak Eisenberg: 04:09
Yeah. Yeah. Those companies where the technology wasn’t quite there yet. It was still extremely expensive to run that type of company. We sort of molded a company that did that as well as had in-person training events, but in China.
So we would actually bring Americans to China to deliver the same service. We just could serve many more students. And it was a lot more affordable because instead of, you know, several hundred students coming here and paying for flights, etc., we just sent ten people and we could meet with all those people there. It was very successful.
John Corcoran: 04:47
There would be like a day long training or like a day long training or something like that.
Zak Eisenberg: 04:52
Multi-day Conferences and a bunch of cities.
John Corcoran: 04:54
Oh, wow.
Zak Eisenberg: 04:55
Okay. With training courses. And then there was a follow up website where we had a bunch of content and yeah, you know, videos and stuff like that. And it went pretty well. For a while.
And eventually it was time to exit that company. Like I said, there were, you know, some real headwinds there that made it challenging to scale the way that we want.
John Corcoran: 05:15
What were those? What were those headwinds that you ran into?
Zak Eisenberg: 05:19
Well, one of them was the Chinese government.
John Corcoran: 05:23
That minor detail.
Zak Eisenberg: 05:25
Yeah. Operating in China can be a little challenging. And at the time, they were still a little skeptical of, you know, Americans operating there, even though my partner was Chinese. There was some pushback on that.
John Corcoran: 05:40
Have you ever had any tense moments where they, like, stopped you at the airport kind of thing? Like those types of stories or preventing you from putting on them.
Zak Eisenberg: 05:48
But local and local party officials came to the conferences. The Department of Education party officials. And it was a warm reception. But, you know, again, they were watching. Yeah.
Beyond that, it was difficult for us to really make a profit. The economics were such that for staff who were here, you know, American Americans, it was tough to make this system work over the long term. If we couldn’t scale the tech side, which we weren’t really able to do effectively. So after five years, we exited. And yeah, for me, it was mostly an awesome experience and kind of an opening into this new world of finance.
And I raised some capital for the startup. So I got exposed to venture capital and deal making and found that really interesting. And when it was time to walk away from that company, I. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do at that point. So venture capital seemed like a great, great option.
Finance in many ways is a great place to really learn about business generally and get exposed to a bunch of people who are super smart and doing cool things and stirring companies. And yeah, that’s, that’s where I ended up after, after that.
John Corcoran: 07:20
So you end up so you end up in venture capital, you raised money before. What was it like going into like kind of flipping sides from being at a startup where you had raised money to being in the world of VC and learning about that?
Zak Eisenberg: 07:34
Well, it was hard also because I didn’t study business or anything in college. I actually started school as an acting major and made my way into some other spaces like economics, etc. but. yeah, the hardest thing was I got really passionate about operations because I started this, this company, and I always wanted to operate these businesses that I thought were good investments. But that’s not really the role of, you know, good VC. Yeah.
Yeah. So putting on that advisor hat took me a few years to kind of, you know, really get in the mindset of instead of doing it. And yeah, that first, that first one was, that was my first exposure really to healthcare in a big way was biotech life science and not kind of how, you know, everyday exposure to healthcare is, is, comes about where you’re going to a doctor’s office. It was sort of, you know, PhDs working on their bench, working on some crazy new pharmaceutical or biotech device. Pretty fun.
But yeah, that was a, that was an interesting experience. And it got me involved in Sort of high finance as well. Deal making and doing transactions which has been fun too.
John Corcoran: 08:52
And what drew you to healthcare? How did you go from Ed tech to being interested in healthcare? Was there a particular, you know, transaction? Was there a particular client or anything like that that sparked your interest?
Zak Eisenberg: 09:03
Yeah, I’d like to say that it was super purposeful, but the honest answer is that my now wife, my girlfriend at the time, was living in New Orleans. And after I exited my company, I went down there to live with her and gave myself six months to get a VC job or a job at a startup.
John Corcoran: 09:24
Get a VC job in New Orleans.
Zak Eisenberg: 09:26
In New Orleans.
John Corcoran: 09:27
Okay. Okay. So I live in this area of the Bay area. And literally I went mountain biking yesterday with a friend who’s a VC. Lots of VC s around here.
I haven’t heard about a lot of venture capital in New Orleans.
Zak Eisenberg: 09:40
There aren’t. I think the fund I ended up at is one of like three in the city. Okay. It’s actually interesting. New Orleans actually has an extremely active angel community that has the biggest angel network in the country.
Oh, wow. If you’re familiar with angel networks, that’s like 300 members. Yeah. So super active. Lots of money in New Orleans, obviously.
But yeah, it was, it was a little challenging. Thus the six months. Yeah. But yeah, eventually landed this, this spot. And yeah, it was a ton of fun.
John Corcoran: 10:17
Yeah. That’s interesting. It’s almost like you give yourself like the world’s hardest challenge. I’m gonna go to New Orleans and I’m gonna, you know, join a venture capital firm and be like, I don’t know, you know, going, going to, you know, Minnesota and be like, I want a job in the federal government in politics or something like that. Like completely different industries, you know?
Zak Eisenberg: 10:37
Well, John, in my defense, New Orleans is a lot of fun. And also I was very motivated because I wanted to live with my girlfriend. That’s that. And it worked out because we’re married now, so. Yeah.
Yeah. I think it was a good call. Yeah.