Bio

Eric D. Hargan is the Founder and CEO of The Hargan Group, a healthcare consulting firm. Eric previously served as the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2017 to 2021; he also served as Acting Secretary for several months in 2017-2018. HHS is the largest department in the federal government and has an annual budget of more than $1.3 trillion and over 80,000 employees across 26 divisions. As Deputy Secretary, he oversaw the development and approval of all HHS, CMS and FDA regulations and significant guidances, as well as the day-to-day operations and management of the department, and he led policy and strategy development. From 2003 to 2007, Mr. Hargan also served at HHS in a variety of capacities, including holding the position of Acting Deputy Secretary.

He served on the Board of Operation Warp Speed, starting in Spring of 2020, helping to develop the project and coordinate HHS agencies. Also, in response to the pandemic, in March 2020, he launched the $175 billion Provider Relief Fund, overseeing it until July 2020, sending over $100 billion in relief to U.S. healthcare providers in a little over three months.

In the area of regulatory reform, he coordinated the comprehensive HHS telehealth response in 2020, enabling telehealth to grow by a factor of over a thousand in a few months. From 2017 to 2021, he initiated, sponsored and led four agencies in the Regulatory Sprint to Coordinated Care, a four-agency project to reform regulations to enable better-coordinated care.

In the area of innovation, he coordinated and led the successful launch of the interoperability rule by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (establishing national standards and prohibiting information blocking, among other things). In 2018-2019, he initiated, sponsored and led the Innovation and Investment Summit, a first-of-its-kind summit dedicated to bringing together top investors and innovators in U.S. healthcare with Federal healthcare leadership.

In the area of public health, he convened and led the year-long Federal Quality Summit in 2019, which spelled out the pathway for further healthcare quality reform, announced in May 2020. He led the rural health initiative within HHS in 2019-2020, leading to reforms in telehealth expansion, rural broadband, a new reimbursement model for rural health, and many other initiatives across the Department. He served as Commissioner on the WHO’s High-Level Commission on Non-Communicable Diseases (2018-2019).

He received his B.A. cum laude from Harvard University and his J.D. from Columbia University Law School, where he was Senior Editor of the Columbia Law Review. In between tours of duty at HHS, Mr. Hargan was a law partner in healthcare regulation, mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance and government relations. He has taught at Loyola, Vanderbilt, Cornell and Minnesota Universities. His editorials have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Austin American-Statesman, among others. He also writes a regular column for RealClearHealth. He is currently the CEO of The Hargan Group, a strategic healthcare consulting group, and serves on the boards of University Hospitals, Alio Medical, Tomorrow Health, HealthTrackRx, VeriOnce, IVT, Capital Pulse and Meomind. He is a Health Evolution Forum Fellow, an Industry Advisory Board at the UNC & NC State Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering and a Senior Fellow of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Mr. Hargan was born and raised in Mounds, Illinois. He currently lives in Virginia with his wife and their two sons.