Meet the entrepreneur who started as a keypunch operator at INCO and today runs an electric billing company with 57 employees in downtown Huntington.
By Carter Seaton
HQ 109 | SPRING 2020
If anyone embodies the shift from 20th-century technology to today’s digital age, it’s Tara Jones Vosler. In 1986, she founded Medical Claims Assistance Inc. (MCA) to handle electronic billing for ambulance services. But her story begins much earlier.
As an 18-year-old adventurer, she left her home in Logan, West Virginia, to come to Victor’s Business School located in Huntington’s West Virginia Building. There she learned keypunching, a long-discarded system of data entry, which led to her first job as a keypunch operator at the International Nickel Company (INCO), now Special Metals.
Always eager to learn, she also enrolled in several career planning classes offered at work. David Harris, then INCO’s personnel manager, heard Vosler asking probing questions in class and offered her a job in his department. There she oversaw all the medical benefits for the company’s more than 4,000 employees. During her six-year tenure in that position, she took computer classes and was promoted to assistant engineer to do programming and analyzing. Vosler says she was a better analyst than coder. Apparently so — she soon developed programs for the company’s mainframe to control inventory, manage its hourly timekeeping system and implement the first salary system that did not require storage on tapes. In all, she was at INCO for 19 years, honing her skills for what was to become the business she now owns.
Although she had a good job that she enjoyed, Vosler also wanted to develop a business of her own.
“I started trying to help people with their medical bills because it was so complicated,” she recalls. “But I couldn’t charge what I really needed to for the time spent, so I never really made any money.”
At the same time, some of her friends had started a private ambulance service called Trans-Med. Back then, most such services were operated by volunteers, so this was a new venture.
Vosler had heard of computer software that could bill electronically, so she mentioned it to her friend at Trans-Med. He asked her to write a program for them.
“I wanted a personal computer so badly. I think they were about $2,300, but I couldn’t afford it,” she explains. “So, they agreed to buy me a PC if I would write an app for them to do ambulance billing.”
She wrote the program over the Thanksgiving break, despite a loose pet ferret that kept biting her heel when she tried to catch it. She used that same app from 1986 until 1998, when she helped write a new version.
Vosler also realized volunteer ambulance services could benefit from using her program. Back then, they were primarily funded by levies or donations. When she called Medicare to ask if the groups could bill for their services, she was told yes. So, she called the Wayne Volunteer Fire Department to see if they would be interested. They signed on and are still one of MCA’s customers 34 years later.
The rest is history. In 1986, following in the footsteps of her entrepreneur father, Bill Jones, who owned a Ford dealership at the age of 27, she decided it was time to make her dream a reality. She got a loan from her father, contacted the Small Business Administration and went to work. Although she had no idea how to actually begin, she learned.
“Within two years I was programming full time and was doing billing at home and on the weekends for 14 different volunteer ambulance services,” she notes.
Plus, she was still working at INCO — but she was burning out. Fortunately, at that time, INCO offered a buyout to certain employees if they volunteered to resign. She took the offer and never looked back.
Working from home, she often found herself watching too much Home Shopping Network, so she moved the business into a one-room office near Cabell Huntington Hospital. After hiring another person, they moved to a three-room office on Eighth Avenue. With more growth came another move, this time to the Morris Building where MCA occupied an entire floor.
In 1999, she bought the old Model Furniture building on Fourth Avenue and named it the Bill Jones Building in memory of her father, who had died that year. Today, with 57 employees, several of whom are family, she has over 200 clients. The company switched to a software product in 2014 that allows ambulance crews to enter case information while still in the field, which her staff then properly codes and submits to the insurance companies.
When she started the business, her former boss, David Harris, said it wouldn’t last because of Vosler’s insatiable desire to learn and to do something new. But here she is, 34 years later, still involved.
Vosler calls MCA a family business, one she hopes her grandsons, Toren and Beau, will be running someday. Although she retired from the day-to-day work a few years after open-heart surgery, she returned to assist in the transition to the new software. With her daughter, Kendra Black, running things as vice president, and her brother David handling the finances, she’s now fully retired, but still strongly connected.
“I’m always at their fingertips if they need me,” she says.
Nevertheless, she’s trying to find things to keep herself busy. She wants to travel, loves art history and hopes to find a residence on water so she and her husband Dave can enjoy fishing. But knowing her history, it’s going to be hard to keep this entrepreneur sitting still for very long.
