When I graduated from college I was recruited by Arthur Andersen& Co. Chicago Office.  My accounting professor Myron Sorden, recommended me to them after I was awarded the Wall Street Journal annual award to the outstanding Bachelor of Science and Business graduate.  Little did I know that this was a chance of my lifetime to pursue a career not just a job. It enabled me and my new family to move to the city and pursue this opportunity with the number one public accounting firm in the world.  I went to the firm's boot camp not knowing what that meant in terms of what I didn't l know  versus what I was expected to do in a short period of time.  I didn't really know how nor was I prepared to take the CPA exam since I was a liberal arts graduate not an accounting major from the University of Illinois.  After surviving the four weeks of hell I was prepared to bring my wife Shari and Christie our two year old  daughter to the city of 7 million from our home town of  5 thousand.  My first assignment after sitting in the firm's library for only a week I was assigned to an audit and spent the next month running an adding machine reconciling bank accounts for a bowling supply company.

While there I was called in and told I was being transferred to the Small Business division immediately.  I couldn't have been happier and began my health care consulting career the next week.   I was assigned to the Blue Cross Blue Shield account.   From day one, August 1st 1961, I was a health care consultant in training for which I had been recruited ... a career for path that would last for years.   I was with AA&Co. for eight years, took the CPA exam passed it the first time and became a so  called Medicare expert ... when Medicare was passed in June 1964 and AA&Co. was to roll out Medicare to hospitals and skilled nursing homes.  At the time I was doing hospital cost report audits for Blue Cross and inherited the assignment to set up Medicare cost reporting procedures in hospitals.   From there I took a job offer from another CPA public accounting firm that had 26 catholic hospital clients and I was their Medicare cost report expert.  I was made a partner and then was recruited by another CPA public accounting firm to set up their health care division.  My next move was to start my own public accounting firm J.L. Rhoads & Co. and a consulting firm MBO Manage Better Operations specializing in nursing home systems and operations.  This led to starting a software development company for cost accounting and billing for nursing homes.

I was basically too soon with my vision of what the nursing homes needed to be competitive with hospitals and set up Rhoads Reimbursement Systems to capture Medicare money for skilled nursing facilities.  When one of my clients needed an on site administrator I passed the nursing home administration exam and became a licensed nursing home administrator.  I became a turn-a-round trouble shooter fixing troubled de-certified nursing homes then my wife, son and I purchased three facilities ... all troubled and in need of our computer systems and management philosophy and procedures.  After losing a battle to change the regulatory nightmare we sold all three and now are authoring our experience and solutions into books for sale.  I am told by some of my contemporaries that it is only a matter of time when the need will catch up with our solutions.   Now my readers will have to judge and help us implement them.  This is all chronicled at  www.jerryrhoadsauthor.com