There was no gleaming laboratory at the beginning of ExactCare. There was the back of Lutheran Family Pharmacy in Cleveland, some bubble packs, a heat sealer and a pharmacist filling doses by hand. Dale Wollschleger was assembling medication into small packets timed for different parts of a person’s day. The work was fussy. It was also a prototype.
Wollschleger had noticed a peculiarity hiding in plain sight. People could have a general practitioner and a collection of specialists, yet they often did not think of themselves as having a pharmacist. They went to a pharmacy. The verb described an errand, not a relationship. For anyone managing a long list of prescriptions, the distinction mattered. Bottles arrived from several directions. Instructions changed. Nobody owned the whole picture.
His response was both clinical and deeply operational: gather the information, reconcile it, organize the doses, deliver them, and stay available when the regimen changed. The packet was visible. The coordination around it was the larger invention.
“I wanted to make it easier and safer for patients to take multiple medications.”
The founder before the company
The orderly packet did not come from an orderly career plan. Born and raised in Cleveland, Wollschleger has said he spent high school caring more about football, working out and friends than grades. Business school briefly crossed his mind, but he decided he already understood business well enough. Youth is generous that way. His father was a pharmacist, so Dale chose pharmacy school instead.
He attended the University of Toledo before transferring into Ohio Northern University’s pharmacy program. While classmates studied, he sometimes day-traded from class. In retrospect, he suspects the market charged him tuition of its own. He also started a power-washing business, cleaning decks and driveways. The side ventures reveal a recurring itch: he preferred testing an idea to admiring one.
Even the family business became a small lesson in negotiation. As a student working for his father, Wollschleger asked for more money. His father declined and invited him to find somebody willing to pay it. Dale did. A competitor called his father to make sure this family drama was not a misunderstanding, then hired the son at twice the wage. His father still enjoys telling the story.
After graduating around 2001, Wollschleger joined Medic Pharmacy, a regional Cleveland chain. He moved among stores and looked for ways to build their business. When a proposed growth initiative came without the contract he wanted, he left for a tiny pharmacy inside Lutheran Hospital near the West Side Market. He accepted the job on one condition: he needed the right to buy the place within three years.
Then success complicated the agreement. He doubled the pharmacy’s business in his first year, which meant he was busily increasing the price of his future purchase. The sensible move was to buy sooner. Roughly a year and a half in, around 2004, he did.
A packet becomes a platform
Ownership widened the canvas. Wollschleger bought another pharmacy and launched Family Home Care, a durable medical equipment venture, in 2006. He eventually sold the side businesses while keeping Lutheran Family Pharmacy. In 2009, ExactCare began behind it.
The first workflow was deliberately literal. For a person taking many medications, Wollschleger placed each dose into the appropriate bubble by hand, sealed the package with heat, and paired it with reminders for patients or caregivers. When the approach worked, the next question was not whether the idea looked clever. It was whether the work could survive volume.
He found multidose packing machinery, then discovered that buying a machine did not produce a ready-made company. The pharmacy software had to be adjusted. Processes had to be built. Technology joined the counter work one constraint at a time. ExactPack, the proprietary patient-specific packaging system that emerged, made a complicated schedule legible: a packet for a particular person at a particular time.
In 2011, Wollschleger bought a small pharmacy in New Jersey and started another ExactCare operation behind it. The model traveled. By 2013, the workforce had expanded from three people to 70. By 2015, ExactCare said it was licensed in 48 states and Washington, D.C. The company appeared repeatedly on the Inc. 5000.
Recognition arrived while the machinery was still becoming a company. In 2014, Wollschleger won the EY Northeast Ohio Entrepreneur of the Year award in Health and Wellness Services. He advanced from the regional program to become one of four national finalists in its Life Science category. The following year, the Smart 50 program honored him and gave him its special award for innovation. ExactCare, meanwhile, collected places on the Inc. 5000 and local workplace lists.
Awards can make a founder’s story look preordained. The operating history is less decorative. Licenses had to be obtained state by state. Clinical liaisons carried the model into new communities. Automation needed software, and software needed people who understood how a pharmacist actually moved through the day. Wollschleger tells of meeting the man who became ExactCare’s technology leader because that man’s wife worked as a clinical liaison. She came home with pages of handwritten work. He looked at the pages and said he could program the task. Wollschleger hired him.
It is a neat little account of how an organization learns. The solution did not descend from a strategy retreat. Friction traveled home with an employee, was recognized by somebody with a different skill set, and came back as a possibility. Wollschleger’s contribution was not knowing how to write every program. It was noticing the person who did.
The awkward art of getting larger
Growth changed the founder’s work. Behind the counter, Wollschleger had filled whatever role the hour required, from pharmacy operations to technology. Leading a national organization meant finding people whose experience exceeded his in specific rooms.
His first outside investor was Cleveland-based Primus Capital. Later, after hiring a banker, ExactCare partnered with the healthcare-focused Nautic Partners. Wollschleger is candid about the education: hard board meetings, pressure to meet numbers, and the strange translation between patient service and financial scale. The pharmacist who could once know every employee and family member had to learn how culture moves through layers of leaders.
“Hire the right people.” Simple advice, expensive lessons.
The practical formula he offers is more useful than a founder myth. Hire people who have already encountered the terrain. Teach them what you learned from being close to the problem. Put the two bodies of knowledge together. ExactCare’s later history, involving acquisitions, integrations and new executives, made that less an aphorism than a survival method.
Buys Lutheran Family Pharmacy earlier than planned after rapidly growing it.
Starts ExactCare in the back of that pharmacy and develops the ExactPack model.
Wins regional EY honors and a Smart 50 innovation award.
Moves from daily CEO work toward board service and new company-building roles.
Knowing when the title has done its work
Wollschleger stepped away from the ExactCare CEO position around 2022 while remaining on its board. The company continued its own complicated adulthood. ExactCare and Tabula Rasa HealthCare combined in November 2023. The broader organization became AnewHealth, with ExactCare continuing as part of the pharmacy business under new leadership.
His next chapter remained adjacent to the original puzzle. In June 2023 he joined the board of HealthPlan Data Solutions, the pharmacy analytics company now called Rivera; public company records list him as chairman. He has also been listed as a director of virtual-care business Cosán Group. The operator became an adviser without pretending the underlying industry had suddenly become tidy.
In fact, the untidiness still irritates him. Pharmacy economics divide incentives among manufacturers, insurers, benefit managers and pharmacies. Wollschleger has argued for more transparency and for recognizing the service a pharmacy provides, not merely the product it dispenses. His instinct is not to wait for the system to become reasonable. It is to keep creating workable paths through it.
Cleveland as a method
For all the talk of national licensing and outside capital, Wollschleger’s geography has stayed personal. Cleveland is his birthplace, his family’s home and the workshop in which the company took shape. He takes pride in Ohio’s habit of producing capable healthcare people and has spoken about helping local founders through investment and advice.
He also wants the Browns to win a Super Bowl, a hope that nicely establishes the depth of his Cleveland commitment. In a 2025 interview, he described Ohioans as grounded and well-rounded, then asked the obvious localist question: why not grow companies and grow Ohio?
There is a modest but durable philosophy beneath the career. Start close enough to notice what the standard transaction misses. Do the work manually until the useful pattern becomes visible. Automate the pattern, not the empathy. Hire people who can carry the system farther than its inventor. And when the organization no longer requires the founder’s title, find another useful corner.
The first ExactPacks were not glamorous. They were sealed one by one in the back of a pharmacy. That is precisely why they matter. Before ExactCare became a corporate story, it was a patient routine made a little easier to follow. The scale came later.