Rich Waller

Healthcare organizations spend millions on AI. They hire data scientists, buy analytics platforms, attend conferences about "digital transformation." And yet - fewer than 20% of them actually trust the data those systems run on. Rich Waller built his career on that gap.

As President and CEO of WellStack, Waller leads a Madison, Wisconsin-based company that does something unglamorous but essential: it builds the data plumbing that makes healthcare analytics actually work. Not the dashboards. Not the AI models. The foundation underneath all of it - a unified data ecosystem that ingests electronic health records, claims data, financial information, and operational feeds, and turns the whole tangled mess into something a clinician or administrator can actually act on.

WellStack calls these "Decision Hubs." Waller calls them the difference between knowing you have a problem and knowing what to do about it.

The company serves more than 150 provider and payer organizations - health systems, accountable care organizations, health plans, and population health teams - and its platform is built on Snowflake's data cloud, certified to HITRUST e1 standards. For context: HITRUST e1 is the same security certification framework that major health insurance companies use to demonstrate they won't accidentally leave patient data on a public server. It's not easy to get. WellStack has it.

Waller's bio at WellStack is deliberately sparse. He describes himself as "a technology executive and entrepreneur dedicated to serving teams passionate about creating information architectures that drive brilliant, multi-channel user experiences." That sentence could apply to a hundred tech executives. What makes Waller different is where he's been doing it.

Before WellStack, Waller spent more than a decade at VisiQuate, the Santa Rosa, California-based healthcare analytics company he co-founded in 2009. He wore two hats there - CTO first, then Chief Experience Officer - and the transition between those roles tells you something. He started as the engineer who builds the thing, then became the executive who obsesses over whether the person using it finds it useful, intuitive, and worth opening again tomorrow.

The VisiQuate experience left a mark. In an interview with Authority Magazine, Waller distilled his entire philosophy of customer experience into five rules: focus on jobs-to-be-done, invest in brilliant design, create fanatical client advocates, build rapid feedback loops, and - perhaps unexpectedly from a data infrastructure executive - "bring fun to the process." That last one appears in almost every public statement he's made. It is not an afterthought.