Ms. Adams currently serves as Special Advisor at the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), providing leadership for the NAM Digital Health and Evidence Mobilization portfolios. Her primary expertise is digital health transformation, healthcare innovation, and human-centered care and for the past 20 years has held leadership positions across a wide variety of healthcare-focused organizations and as a founding member of multiple healthcare, IT companies.

Of note, from 2001 to 2019, Ms. Adams served as the founding President and CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), an organization enabling the best healthcare for the state by providing and connecting trusted data. As part of her tenure she led the Rhode Island Statewide ICU Collaborative as Principal Investigator driving a 62% decrease in catheter-related central line infections; a 48% drop in ventilator-associated pneumonia; a 37% reduction in sepsis mortality; and an estimated $25M in avoided costs. 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 and 2019 lists of Female Health IT Leaders to Know.

Previously, Ms. Adams also chaired the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Planning Committee for the “Digital Infrastructure for Population Health and a Learning Healthcare System” initiative. Ms. Adams was the Founder, President, and CEO of Decision Support Systems, a New York-based company specializing in Internet-based healthcare decision support. Laura Adams has been a long-time faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Boston. She serves on the board of Translational Medicine Accelerator (TMA), a Boston-based precision medicine company focusing on patients with recalcitrant and rare diseases; and the Oversight Council for the MA Center for Health Information and Analysis. Ms. Adams earned a Master of Science from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and a B.S. from the University of Northern Colorado, of which she was named Distinguished Alumnus in 2010.