40 Influential Leaders - Heather Staples Lavoie

Heather Staples Lavoie
CEO of Illume Advisors

For many people, medical care revolves around doctors’ offices, specialist visits or in some cases, hospital stays. Heather Staples Lavoie, the CEO of the consulting firm Illume Advisors, is using technology and analytics to help change that paradigm.

As chair of the NH Tech Alliance, Lavoie is able to spotlight cutting edge work by companies across NH, including that of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) in Manchester that could change medicine forever.

At other points in her 35-year career, she has worked in healthcare policy and advanced analytics, including a branch that predicts the onset and progression of disease in a population. She also has worked to expand the use of remote patient monitoring and other innovations that bring treatments into the home setting.

“The work across my career has universally focused on affordability and health outcomes,” she says. “Whether that is from the perspective of a hospital or a health plan, it is with an eye on both. Of late, this has been expanded to make sure care is rendered equitably.”

Lavoie re-launched Illume Advisors in Hopkinton about two years ago after working in strategy and later as president and CEO for Geneia, a healthcare analytic startup that operated from Manchester’s Millyard.

She describes Illume as a boutique advisory and strategy consulting firm. She primarily provides advisory services for start-ups and technical strategy for healthcare organizations, which include health insurers, hospitals and provider networks, tapping into her experience in technology, data warehousing, operations, policy and cost containment. “Because of my diverse background, I am often asked to advise on complex, cross-sectional efforts for leadership teams,” she says.

 Lavoie holds a particular fondness for NH. It has a history of positive health outcomes and its relatively small size makes collaboration more attainable. And it’s common to get decision makers together in the same room to work on solutions together.

 “I’m a New Hampshire native. I grew up on Manchester’s West Side and looked across the river at the mills,” she says. “To see the Millyard now being used for high tech medical advances with a global reach is truly exciting.”