Anna McCollister
Role:
Individual
HITAC Member Terms:
Term 1: 1/2023 – 12/2025
Anna McCollister is a health technology entrepreneur, strategic consultant and reform advocate.
Her work focuses on creating new ways to involve health care constituents in critical aspects of
health research, data governance, evidence development and policy reform.
Anna has founded two health technology startups: VitalCrowd, a Web-based collaboration
platform for crowdsourcing the design of health research, and Galileo Analytics, a visual data
exploration and analytics company aimed at democratizing access to and understanding of
complex health data. Previously, she served as Chief Advocate for Participatory Research at the
Scripps Research Translational Institute (SRTI). Through that work, Anna was a Co-Primary
Investigator for the “All of Us“ Research Program a centerpiece of the National Institutes of
Health’s Precision Medicine Initiative.
Since 2019, Anna has worked as an independent consultant, advising C-Suite leaders and
developing strategic approaches for engaging patients and advocacy groups in critical aspects
of corporate and public policy. Anna’s work covers an array of issues and topics, but focuses
heavily on data access, use, ethics and governance, with a goal of building corporate programs
that enable companies and organizations to earn the trust of patients through action.
Anna’s passion for innovation in healthcare is rooted in her personal experiences living with type 1 diabetes. As an entrepreneur and advocate, she was among the founders of the #WeAreNotWaiting movement, a global patient-led hacker movement that helped accelerate the pace of diabetes device data access, connectivity and interoperability. She speaks frequently about the promise of digital health, the critical need for patient data access and the imperative and promise of using “real world” data to gain better insight into treatments for complex illness. She serves on a number of government advisory committees and private boards, helping to facilitate patient-centered design of products, policy and research.