A Personal Passion, a Powerful Impact: Booz Allen’s Kristine Martin Anderson

What can happen when you believe anything is possible and are fueled with a passion to change the world?

For Kristine Martin Anderson, it led to her becoming an Executive Vice President at Booz Allen where she leads the firm’s civilian services group. For Anderson, the journey started with healthcare, and the motivation was personal.  Her mother did not have health insurance when she was growing up, as she told WashingtonExec magazine, which named her 2018 Healthcare Executive of the Year. “I knew what decisions our family made because there wasn’t any insurance.”

Anderson nurtured an interest in health and medicine through her university studies. Yet she didn’t want to be a doctor or a scientist. She describes herself as a “macro person” with a passion for healthcare, but realized working in a lab or delivering care were not how she wanted to fulfill that passion. As a result, her early career focused on healthcare quality improvement and how technology and the exchange of health information could accelerate healthcare reform goals.

Today, Anderson’s interests and impact extend beyond healthcare to the broader citizen services delivered by government. She leads an organization that is guiding digital transformation in civilian government agencies, in support of some of our nation’s most critical missions.

Recognizing technology’s potential to address healthcare challenges

Early in her career, Anderson was seeing, firsthand, the frustration physicians were having with managed care and she had a growing passion to develop solutions that could reduce healthcare costs and improve the quality of care.  Anderson saw that technology could enable information liquidity and the exchange of healthcare data and she could envision this, combined with appropriate policy and standards, dramatically changing the healthcare landscape.

After years of working to improve healthcare quality and safety within the provider community and experiencing the challenges of implementing change hospital by hospital, Anderson began considering how she could apply her expertise at a national level to drive even greater impact.

Moving to government consulting for broader impact

The desire to impact more people, and scale that impact through technology, led Anderson to Booz Allen’s civilian services group. In the healthcare sector, she’s worked on the adoption of health IT in government agencies and the implementation of electronic health records. And now as the head of this group, she’s expanded her work to other citizen-based services and missions—from Treasury to Homeland Security to Justice.

“There’s just so much going on,” she said of civilian services, “and it’s interesting to me to see the pace of adoption, how it changes according to the business problem, how pressing the business problem is, and whether or not it’s funded.”

Across government, Anderson is bringing Booz Allen’s civilian services group and federal agencies together in a shared mission: expanding services to a greater number of citizens, more efficiently.   

Leadership lessons from a life in sports

An avid soccer player, Anderson sees leadership development as a primary benefit of being involved in sports. She honed some of her own leadership skills and gained a deep appreciation for the power of teamwork through soccer. “You learn how to work as a cohesive group,” she said. “You get all these different opportunities at different times to show leadership.” She helped to start a women’s team in high school and lobbied the athletic department at the University of Pennsylvania to make the club soccer team a varsity team. She applies lessons learned on the soccer field to her work today with women and women’s leadership groups. Anderson is deeply committed to giving every person opportunity and the chance to be their best in their own way. She believes this is one way she can help develop and prepare diverse women to move up into leadership roles.

Read the full WashingtonExec article and learn more about women at Booz Allen.