Anna McCollister

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.