Influential Women Spotlights Lauren Fung: Associate Partner in Healthcare Consulting at IBM
Chicago, Illinois – Lauren Fung is an Associate Partner in Healthcare Consulting at IBM, where she focuses on digital health platforms, AI-enabled transformation, and operating model change across payer, provider, and public health organizations. With over 15 years of experience, Lauren has guided healthcare leaders from ambition to execution, turning complex challenges into clear roadmaps, measurable outcomes, and sustainable impact.
Lauren is recognized for her ability to bring order to complexity. She stabilizes programs under pressure, aligns stakeholders with competing priorities, and establishes governance structures that drive decision-making, delivery, and accountability. Her work spans multi-year portfolios in North America and global markets, including public health program governance, the evolution of digital health platforms into multi-market ecosystems, and practical strategies adopted by thousands of healthcare practitioners.
Before joining IBM, Lauren held senior roles at Cognizant, myNEXUS®, and Harpeth Consulting, where she focused on provider networks, large-scale transformations, and payer-provider operations. She began her career supporting campus wellness programs at Vanderbilt University, earning a BS in Human & Organizational Development. Throughout her career, Lauren has mentored more than 270 consultants, cultivating confident leaders and establishing repeatable processes that enable teams to execute faster and deliver results that endure.
Lauren attributes her success to three key principles: being proactive in creating opportunities, being prepared when they arise, and earning the trust necessary to execute effectively. She has been fortunate to have leaders who opened doors for her, but she has also learned to seek out work independently, build a compelling case for it, and step forward even before the path is clearly defined. Success, she believes, comes down to the team: aligning people quickly, transforming ambiguity into actionable plans, and following through until tangible outcomes are achieved, allowing leaders to feel confident entrusting her with future initiatives.
The best career advice Lauren has received is to never outsource ownership of her career. She advocates for taking the reins, being intentional about the opportunities she accepts, and building work that endures beyond immediate deadlines. This approach emphasizes creating durable capabilities, systems, and talent that continue to generate value long after a project concludes.
When advising young women entering her industry, Lauren emphasizes three guiding themes: Voice, Velocity, and Village.
Voice: She encourages taking up space early, speaking clearly and with conviction, even before feeling fully “ready.”
Velocity: She stresses intentional growth, seeking stretch opportunities, maintaining curiosity across business and technology, and letting competence drive confidence.
Village: She advises cultivating a circle of mentors and sponsors to advocate for one’s success, setting sustainable boundaries, and staying authentic while lifting other women as they advance.
In Lauren’s view, the biggest challenges in healthcare today include rising costs, workforce burnout, tighter margins, consolidation, and increasing expectations from patients and members. The greatest opportunity, she observes, is not simply adopting more technology, but redesigning care and operations end-to-end, then leveraging platforms, data, and AI to improve outcomes at lower cost, reduce friction, and enhance safety. She notes that healthcare remains fundamentally a trust-based system—technology amplifies strategy but cannot replace it. If patients, clinicians, or organizations cannot operationalize and measure solutions effectively, they will fail to achieve meaningful impact.
Lauren’s values center on intellectual honesty, clarity, and accountability to outcomes, which guide both her professional work and personal life. She prioritizes logically sound solutions, practical in the real world, and capable of creating lasting impact. She is motivated by building fair, understandable, and trustworthy systems and commitments, particularly in complex or large-scale environments where unintended harm or exclusion can occur.
She approaches influence and ambition as responsibilities rather than expressions of ego, using them to shape decisions, align teams, and drive meaningful change. Integrity, generosity, and consistent follow-through are at the heart of her leadership philosophy. Lauren aims to develop future leaders, strengthen communities and institutions, and leave behind work, relationships, and norms that continue to generate value long after her direct involvement ends.
Through her expertise, mentorship, and unwavering commitment to transforming healthcare, Lauren Fung continues to shape a future where innovation, trust, and leadership deliver lasting impact for patients, providers, and communities alike.
Learn More about Lauren Fung:
Through her Influential Women profile, https://influentialwomen.com/connect/lauren-fung
Influential Women
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