What started as a teacher fixing broken curriculum and buggy software became a published workbook, then a full software ecosystem, then a nationally deployed platform spanning 112 campuses, 80,000+ learners, and $36M+ in revenue — built by one person who left the classroom knowing exactly what the market needed.
The Origin
From 2002 to 2005, Michelle was a medical insurance billing and coding instructor at Corinthian Colleges. The curriculum was painful and inaccurate. The billing software students were required to use was complicated and buggy. Every class was a battle between what the material said and what reality looked like.
Rather than accept it, she started fixing it — updating her own curriculum, contacting the software company directly to push for fixes, and improving the student experience one session at a time. She was, without knowing the title existed, doing product management — and practicing what would now be called user empathy: deeply understanding the frustration of the people in the room and building to fix it. Corinthian Colleges recognized it, paid her for the effort, and brought her in to do in-person trainings with the improved material across their programs.
When she left Corinthian Colleges, she left with something most product builders spend years trying to acquire: she knew exactly what the customer needed, what the syllabus objectives required, what accreditation standards demanded, and what the software had to do to make it all work. She did not guess. She had lived it.
The founding moment: She left teaching and immediately went to work — writing the curriculum herself with Corinthian Colleges as her anchor customer, and working directly with CollaborateMD to build the software integration the platform required. The customer was already there. The problem was already understood. The product just had to be built.
The Journey
This was not a venture-backed startup with a roadmap and a runway. It was a product business built organically, where each milestone created the conditions for the next one. The timeline tells the story:
As an instructor at Corinthian Colleges, identified broken curriculum and buggy billing software, fixed both, and conducted in-person trainings with the improved material — wearing a product hat before the title existed.
Left teaching and built the curriculum from scratch: a 1,476 page medical billing workbook with 300 case studies across ambulatory, hospital, and dental claim types. Corinthian Colleges was the anchor customer. CollaborateMD powered the software integration.
A full pilot launched across 5 Corinthian Colleges campuses — testing the instructor LMS, RCM integration, student mastery workflows, and training media at real scale before broader deployment.
The Corinthian Colleges relationship opened the door to national publishing partnerships. McGraw-Hill and Elsevier published editions of the curriculum, distributing it to campuses across the country and establishing it as standard coursework.
Corinthian Colleges formally adopted the curriculum across all healthcare programs. The product spread into Medical Assisting, Medical Assisting Administration, Healthcare Administration, and Dental Assisting. The platform scaled from 5 campuses to 112, growing to serve 80,000+ students across three interconnected software products and the published curriculum — all owned, managed, and evolved under one roof.
Corinthian Colleges ceased operations, and the platform sunset with it. Twelve years. 112 campuses. 80,000+ learners. $36M+ in revenue. One person.
The Product
What made this platform unusual was that the curriculum, the software, and the training infrastructure were not separate products that happened to coexist — they were designed to work together as a single learning experience. Each component reinforced the others.
The Curriculum Workbook
1,400+ page medical billing workbook with 300 case studies across ambulatory, hospital, and dental claim types. Published nationally by McGraw-Hill and Elsevier. Powered by CollaborateMD. The product that started it all.
EMR / RCM Software
Integrated CollaborateMD EMR and RCM capabilities gave students hands-on experience with real billing software — the same tools they would use in an actual healthcare practice after graduation.
Learning Management System (LMS)
Purpose-built LMS supporting student mastery workflows, auto-scoring, assignment selection, and progress tracking across 112 campuses. Designed to reduce faculty prep time significantly — instructors could easily assign classes to a workbook chapter, score students, and advance them to the next assignment with minimal manual effort.
Training Websites
Separate student-facing and instructor-facing training websites supported self-paced learning, course delivery, and ongoing reference — extending the platform beyond the classroom into independent study.
The published curriculum was the entry point. The software made it real. The LMS made it scalable. The training websites made it sustainable at 112 campuses without requiring Michelle to be in every room.
The Challenge
Building a product alone is one challenge. Scaling it to enterprise deployment across a 112-campus college network — while maintaining curriculum integrity, software performance, and instructor quality — is a fundamentally different problem.
The Approach
The insight that unlocked national scale was this: you cannot personally deliver quality to 80,000 students across 112 campuses. You can build systems that do it for you. The approach was to invest heavily in instructor enablement and platform automation so that the product quality was consistent regardless of which campus or instructor a student encountered.
Publications
The Corinthian Colleges relationship opened publishing deals with two of the largest academic publishers in the country. All three works were Powered by CollaborateMD and became standard curriculum in healthcare billing education programs nationwide.
The Outcomes
What started as a curriculum workbook became one of the most comprehensive healthcare billing education platforms ever built by a single founder — commercially successful, nationally distributed, and deeply integrated into how an entire college network trained its students.
On the sunset: Corinthian Colleges ceased operations in 2018, and the platform sunset with it. This was not a product failure — it was the consequence of an anchor customer's closure. The product had performed at enterprise scale for 12 years, generating $36M+ in revenue and training 80,000+ students. It was a pleasure providing a successful product for so long. It will be missed.
Reflection
“I started this as a teacher who was frustrated that the tools were wrong and the curriculum was worse. I had no product title, no roadmap, and no funding — just a clear picture of what students needed and what instructors deserved. That clarity, built from living inside the problem, is what drove every decision for the next 12 years. It is also why I believe deeply that the best product managers are the ones who understand the operational reality of the people they are building for — not just the personas on a slide.”
This project also taught me that enterprise scale is not just a technology problem. It is a change management problem, a training problem, a vendor management problem, and a communication problem — all at the same time. Managing 112 campuses, 2,000 instructors, national publishing partners, and a software integration while continuing to evolve the curriculum required every product, operational, and leadership skill I had. It is why I can walk into any complex SaaS environment today and know how to find what matters.