Building a Practice Worth Trusting: Leigh Starr on Federal Health Transformation
Building a Practice Worth Trusting: Leigh Starr on Federal Health Transformation
When Leigh Starr joined Artemis ARC nine months ago as executive vice president of health services, she began by asking a foundational question: What does this organization stand for, and where are its strongest, most proven capabilities?
Her instinct to begin with mission before market reflects the perspective she brings to the role. Starr has more than three decades of healthcare experience, including two decades in leadership positions within the Veterans Health Administration and a parallel career as an Air Force Reserve officer. She has experienced firsthand the complexity, workforce pressures and transformation demands that Artemis helps federal agencies to navigate. That experience informs both her credibility and her perspective on how consulting partners can provide meaningful, practical support.
Starting With Credibility, Not Growth
The federal health landscape continues to evolve as agencies navigate restructuring, modernization and workforce demands, often with limited resources and competing priorities.
In that environment, Starr suggests the most valuable thing a consulting partner can offer in addition to strong, multi-facted capability is trust. And trust, in federal health, is earned slowly and lost quickly.
Her first months at Artemis were spent understanding what the company had already built: a solid track record in strategic communications, workforce support and organizational transformation, particularly within VHA. Rather than layering a new vision on top of that foundation, Starr focused on connecting those capabilities into a coherent health system strategy, one centered on operational performance, workforce readiness and safer, more reliable care delivery. Growth, she says, naturally follows credibility and capability. Not the other way around.
That discipline extends to how Artemis pursues new work. The company deliberately does not chase opportunities indiscriminately. Instead, mission-aligned strategy guides the application of Artemis talent and energy. Where mission urgency meets organizational complexity, and where Artemis has the experience to legitimately help, that’s where Artemis wants to be.
Two Differentiators That Actually Matter
Federal healthcare consulting is, as Starr readily acknowledges, a crowded space overall. Many capable and committed organizations work within that space to provide vital support. So, she is both proud and precise about what sets Artemis apart.
She comes back to two differentiators: People and Perspective. Artemis draws from a multi-talented workforce with a passion for federal healthcare, building teams to include practitioners who have served inside the organizations they now support, such as former federal civilian executives, military officers, clinicians and operational leaders. That’s not a branding point; it means the team acutely understands how decisions actually move through federal agencies, where implementation breaks down and what it feels like to receive a consulting deliverable that looks polished but cannot realistically be executed.
That last point deeply matters to Starr. She has been exposed in the past to transformation support that was long on strategy and sometimes shorter on practicality. She was also engaged in high impact transformation work that hit the mark to drive better, safer care for Veterans. She describes this as operational empathy, or a genuine understanding of the day-to-day realities federal health leaders face. In her view, this perspective is essential to developing practical, responsive solutions that reflect both strategic priorities and operational constraints.
How the Partnership Model Works
A significant part of Starr’s work thus far at Artemis has been focused on articulating the value of Artemis’s joint ventures with Aptive Resources. The first, Arrow ARC, supports Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) through two major contracts, Integrated Healthcare Transformation 2.0 and the Integrated Critical Staffing Program. The second, Argent ARC, is newer and where some of the team’s informatics and health systems engineering initiatives reside. She describes these joint ventures as highly authentic partnerships built on shared goals, mutual trust and long-term collaboration.
When Starr was a VHA client years ago, she saw Artemis and Aptive excel as one team. That seamlessness was intentional, and it remains the goal. It is possible, she shares, because the partnership is built on aligned values and a shared mission rather than aligned capabilities alone. Both organizations share a commitment to mission-driven support and to promoting a level of psychological safety, within their own teams and in their work with clients, that makes honest, practical consulting (and that operational empathy) possible.
The way the two organizations work together is complementary and well synchronized. Artemis brings agility, strategic communications depth and experience in transformation support. Aptive brings extensive federal delivery infrastructure, operational maturity and technical depth. Together, they can offer the scalability of a larger organization without surrendering the responsiveness that smaller businesses so often provide. For federal clients worried about disconnected contractors navigating competing interests, Starr says the answer is straightforward: they are one team, and it shows.
What Federal Health Needs Now
Federal health agencies are navigating a broad and complex set of priorities. Starr sees a common thread across many of them: agencies are being asked to advance multiple initiatives at once while ensuring the people responsible for the work have the support they need to succeed.
Change fatigue remains one of the most immediate challenges facing federal health agencies. Many are modernizing electronic health records, improving access, exploring the responsible use of artificial intelligence, addressing workforce shortages and adapting to significant structural change at the same time. Throughout this work, frontline staff and leaders continue striving to deliver high quality, safe, accessible care every day. Even with strong, strategic leadership in place, the pace and volume of change can make it difficult for organizations to move proactively rather than respond to competing demands as they arise.
The second challenge is closely connected.
Successful modernization requires more than new technology. It also depends on clear communication, effective training, thoughtful workflow design and sustained change management to ensure new systems improve care and support the people who use them. Artemis’ human systems integration work in support of VA’s electronic health record modernization reflects this broader approach. Technology enables transformation, but lasting change occurs when it is successfully integrated into frontline operations.
Starr also points to the need for enterprise alignment. She characterizes this as, for example, helping large organizations like VA connect strategy to execution in a way that is coherent at every organizational level based on a sensitivity to operations. She also suggests the need for clearer, more consistent communication with Veterans, patients and staff, based on an overarching commitment to respect for people within a fast-moving information environment. These are not niche capabilities; they are the connective tissue of functional federal health organizations, and right now that tissue is strained.
Success, Defined
Starr is clear that she does not measure success for Artemis primarily in contract wins or revenue growth. She measures it in customer perception and reputation: whether federal health leaders, when they are facing something genuinely hard, think of Artemis as one of the first calls to make based on positive experiences that bring confidence in Artemis’s abilities to contribute to federal healthcare missions.
That kind of reputation is built brick by brick and conversation by conversation, often without an expected or immediate return. She describes a recent call with a federal health executive who was navigating significant organizational change. Starr was there to listen, not to pitch. At the end of the call, the executive said, unprompted: “If we see an opportunity for your team to help, we will absolutely reach out, because you listened.”
That exchange, more than any contract announcement, is what Artemis is building toward. The goal is not a company known for talking about transformation. It is a team known for truly caring about outcomes and for having practical experience within agencies, along with the humility and operational empathy vital to helping federal healthcare organizations not just survive, but thrive, within a complex and challenging landscape.
Leigh Starr is the Executive Vice President of Health Services at Artemis ARC, where she leads the company’s federal health practice. She brings three decades of experience in federal healthcare, including leadership roles within the Veterans Health Administration and service as an active duty and reserve Air Force Medical Service Corps officer.