Laura Adams is a nationally known leader in the improvement of healthcare quality and service. She is the President and CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute, a collaboration of the top leadership of healthcare stakeholders working together to redesign the system of care in the state. The Quality Institute leads the statewide electronic prescribing initiative in Rhode Island and has done so since its origin as the national beta test site for SureScripts. Her work at the national level includes serving on the Markle Foundation’s Connecting for Health HIT Technical Subcommittee and also on the Connecting for Health IT Policy Sub-Committee, as well as the eHealth Initiative's Connecting Communities Work Group.
Laura is a faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Boston and has been since its inception. She directed the IHI/VHA Idealized Design of the Intensive Care Unit project and is a long-time faculty member of VHA’s Transforming the Intensive Care Unit initiative. She is currently the lead consultant on governance for the ground-breaking Improving Performance in Practice (IPIP) Initiative, a Robert Wood Johnson-funded collaborative initiative of the American Board of Medical Specialties, the American College of Physicians, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Board of Family Medicine.
Laura was Founder, President and CEO of Decision Support Systems, a New York-based company specializing in Internet-based healthcare decision support. She was among the first to bring the principles of healthcare quality improvement to the Middle East, in conjunction with Donald M. Berwick, MD and the Harvard Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East. She traveled in the U.S. and Europe with Dr. W. Edwards Deming as a student in the study of statistical-based quality improvement.
Laura's publications include co-authoring with Gustafson, et al, "Developing and Testing a Model to Predict Outcomes of Organizational Change," Health Services Research, 38(2), 751-776. She also co-authored, "Collaborating with Consumers to Advance Health Knowledge and Improve Practice" in Herzlinger, R, Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers and Policymakers, 2004.
Laura's experience in healthcare at the senior management level included her position as Vice President of Patient Services at Parkview Episcopal Medical Center in Colorado and Assistant Administrator for the Universal Health Services' New Orleans area hospitals.