Drew Schiller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Durham-based Validic, a leading digital health platform for personal health data. He is Board Chair of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Health Division and a member of the CTA Executive Board. He also contributes to advancing the industry through CTA policy efforts and his involvement with the CTA Health Standards Subdivision.
Drew also serves on the Boards for the eHealth Initiative (eHI) and the North Carolina Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED). He served as a Team Member for the Clinical Trials Transformation Institute (CTTI) project Advancing the Use of Mobile Technologies for Data Capture & Improved Clinical Trials. He previously served on the Federal Advisory Committee joint HITPC/HITSC API Task Force on Meaningful Use 3.
Before co-founding Validic, Drew started and managed an award-winning web development firm for eight years. He also founded and exited a niche dietary nutrition website for patients with celiac disease, and served as an adjunct instructor at the University of Iowa, teaching graduate courses in web development and usability.
- What is in your pockets?
In my pockets are my phone, wallet, and Air Pods, pretty consistently.
- What exciting thing has happened recently for you or your organization?
Validic is the leader in connecting personal health data from in-home monitoring devices, wearables, and health apps on the phone, into the healthcare system to enable health plans and health systems to proactively monitor people for chronic conditions or engage them in health and wellness activities. We’re enabling a future where all of the daily activities that you’re doing are a part of your healthcare, and we’re elevating that data to ensure that the right care is taken proactively in the right way at the right time.
For us, we are certainly feeling some tailwinds from Covid. Being in the healthcare technology space, our business is really picking up in some exciting ways. Eighteen months ago, before Covid, our biggest challenge was: How do we help large healthcare organizations prioritize and promote healthcare and virtual healthcare, given that we know that that’s where the industry is moving?
And fast-forward to today, it is a top priority for every healthcare organization we work with, and we have more demand than we can handle. So, we’re way ahead of our sales booking goals for the year. We’re hiring like crazy. We just closed the biggest deal in company history. We’re just trying to do all we can to keep up while also maintaining some level of normalcy and sanity inside the organization.
- What is your favorite coffee spot?
I’m a bit of a coffee snob and my favorite coffee spot is making my own, but I try to use locally roasted beans, whether it’s from Counter Culture or Café Femenino, where they use female farmers. In terms of spots that I enjoy going, I love both Cocoa Cinnamon locations in Durham and Joe Van Gogh in Chapel Hill.
- What keeps you up at night?
I am very fortunate. We have a great team and we’ve done a lot of work on putting the right people and processes in place, so on an average night, not much keeps me up. That being said, when I am up at night, it’s generally where I am pushing up against my own limits on something and I have a lot of anxiety around it. It’s more personal growth things where I’m really thinking through, how can I best rise to the challenge to help grow the team and the company in the right way. But like I said, it’s fortunate, and this has not historically always been the case, but fortunately today it’s not an often thing.
- What is your favorite restaurant or happy hour?
I absolutely love food and great cocktails, so this is too difficult for me to answer in a very quick soundbite. One of my favorite things about the area is how many fantastic places there are to eat and enjoy. In downtown Durham where our company headquarters is located, I’ve always loved Mateo and Dashi. Alley Twenty-Six is my go-to for happy hour. I also love the rooftop bar at the Durham Hotel. There’s just so many great places. In Chapel Hill, where I live, I really love Lantern. The food is just fantastic and they have a great back bar with wonderful cocktails.
- What is next for you or your organization?
It’s tough for me to say what’s next because candidly, there’s just a ton of opportunity and I don’t know where that’s going to lead for the company and for me personally. In terms of where things are going for our business, we have fantastic, exciting, new partnerships that we’re bringing on board that are really going to help scale our revenue in a completely different way than we’ve been able to before, just selling in-house. So, that’s really exciting. Those are starting to ramp in a really exciting way. We also have a ton of opportunity for further partnerships as more companies are really taking off in the virtual healthcare space, as we are.
And then for me personally, in addition to continuing my role as CEO, I would like to invest more in the community.
