Laura L. Adams

Senior Advisor
National Academy of Medicine

Laura L. Adams, Senior Advisor at the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), provides leadership for the NAM Digital Health and Evidence Mobilization portfolios of the Leadership Consortium. Her primary expertise is in digital health, biotech, and human-centered care. She serves on the boards of Boston-based T2 Biosystems and Translational Medicine Accelerator (TMA); and is a member of the Oversight Council for the Massachusetts Center for Health Information and Analysis. She is also an advisor for Inflammatix, a Burlingame, CA-based biotech company specializing in host immune response diagnostics.

Previously, Laura was the founding President and CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), a statewide health information exchange. During her time at RIQI, Health Data Management named her one of their 2018 Most Powerful Women in Health IT in the Thought Leader category and Becker’s Hospital Review named her to the 2018 inaugural list of Female Health IT Leaders to Know and to its 2019 list of Women in Health IT to Know. Laura chaired the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Planning Committee for the “Digital Infrastructure for Population Health and a Learning Healthcare System” initiative. She has delivered conference keynotes in nearly every state and in 13 different countries.

Laura was Founder, President, and CEO of Decision Support Systems, a New York-based company specializing in Internet-based healthcare decision support. She has been a long-time faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Boston. She directed the IHI Idealized Design of the Intensive Care Unit project and served as faculty in the VHA’s ICU improvement collaborative. She also served as the Principal Investigator on the RI Statewide ICU Collaborative. She was among the first to bring the principles of healthcare QI to the Middle East, in conjunction with Donald Berwick, M.D. and the Harvard Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East. She served as IHI faculty at the inaugural IHI Middle East Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare in Doha, Qatar.

Under her leadership, RIQI won the National Council for Community Behavioral Health Excellence Award for Impact in serving those with behavioral health and substance abuse challenges. She received citations from the RI Congressional delegation for her visionary leadership and contributions to improving the healthcare system in Rhode Island. Laura’s company was a multi-year winner of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s Exemplary award for Worksite Wellness. RIQI was named RI’s Most Innovative Company in Healthcare in 2015; was named 2017 Employer of Choice by the Employer’s Association of New England; and was a multi-year winner of RI’s Best Places to Work award from the Providence Business News. RIQI won the 2017 Innovation Award in Healthcare in Rhode Island; a national 2018 Healthcare Informatics Innovation Award for impact on the opioid crisis; and was a top finalist for the 2018 New England Business Innovation award, again for impact on the opioid crisis.