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About edHEALTH: A Conversation with Stephen Hannabury, A Co-Founder, Our First President, and Our Chair of the Boards
At our June 2025 member-owner annual meeting, Stephen Hannabury, edRISK Board Chair and Chair of edHEALTH LLC Board of Managers and the edHEALTH Cell Subscribers Advisory Committee, announced his plan to step down from the edHEALTH leadership roles this November. He also noted how the edHEALTH Board had already created a new position of Chair Elect to ensure a smooth succession plan. Lucky for edHEALTH and the other edRISK programs, he’s remaining in the edRISK Board Chair position.
We recently asked Steve a few questions about edHEALTH’s history, growth, evolution into edRISK, and future plans.
In your words, tell us how and when edHEALTH first came to be.
SH: My involvement began in 2009, when I was on the Board of The Boston Consortium for Higher Education (TBC). We were discussing ways we could try to slow the rate of increase in healthcare costs for our institutions. I offered to help with this important initiative.
To say that I knew nothing about how the medical insurance industry worked at the time would be an accurate statement, so this was an unusual project for me to participate in. Given my engineering and finance/administration backgrounds, I never saw myself as an entrepreneur. Still, my experience as a member of the founding team of Olin College of Engineering showed me how exhilarating, satisfying, and admittedly exhausting being part of a start-up could be. I saw edHEALTH as a possibility to do that again, but this time in a multi-institutional collaborative setting that would benefit faculty, staff, and their family members covered by their health plan.
How did you become the first edHEALTH president while still working full-time at Olin?
Since I had a significant role in the efforts leading up to edHEALTH’s creation and was responsible for setting up the legal and operational framework of the companies (the captive itself, the LLC, and two subsidiary companies), it was practical for me to oversee operations as president. All of us on edHEALTH Boards already had full-time positions at our respective institutions, but we were equally committed to this new organization, and each of us took on a “management” role. I became the Board Chair in addition to President after my friend and colleague John Eldert retired, all before edHEALTH officially launched in 2013!
What do you remember about the early days of edHEALTH?
The team who was working to create this new coalition! We had such a talented and dedicated Board of Managers and an excellent set of advisors, attorneys, and business partners. The collaboration enabled us to launch on July 1, 2013, with six brave member-owner colleges and universities. More schools joining the following January showed us that edHEALTH was clearly needed and valued.
What do you consider personal edHEALTH highlights or milestones?
Two come to mind immediately!
1) As we were growing, the Board (also serving as the management committee) realized we needed a full-time leader. Tracy Hassett, a board member and a Human Resources senior vice president at a member-owner school, was heading the search for us. None of us was thrilled with the candidates. It was then that Tracy raised her hand and offered to leave her current position and become the leader we needed. Hiring Tracy as the President and first employee was the most important and consequential decision we have made in the history of edHEALTH.
2) The second highlight occurred over a year ago when we created edRISK and launched the edLIABILITY and edPROPERTY cell captives. We were able to adapt the edHEALTH model to other lines of insurance to help member-owners lower their costs. I am honored to serve as the chair of the edRISK LLC and edRISK Sponsored Captive Boards of Managers.
Where do you see edHEALTH headed?
Now more than ever, I see the continued value and need for a coalition like edHEALTH. Educational institutions, large and small, are facing extraordinary challenges. On the healthcare front, advances in medicine and pharmaceuticals, such as new specialty medications and GLP-1s for weight loss, have significantly driven up healthcare utilization and costs. Having a group of like-minded individuals from different types of schools is a powerful tool for finding solutions to mitigate costs while still enabling faculty and staff to have better healthcare experiences. There are things we can do as a coalition to continue to “bend the cost curve” as we did in the early years of edHEALTH. It requires a commitment from edHEALTH and our individual schools looking at their own plan designs for ways to counteract the rising medical and pharmacy costs.
On the Board side, Tracy and I continue to meet regularly with our Chair Elect, John Burke, Financial Vice President & Treasurer at Boston College, to ensure a smooth transition come November. Both John and I are from founding member-owner schools, so we have a long-established edHEALTH Board working relationship. I’m also not going completely away quite yet. My role as the edRISK Chair will keep me connected to the even greater things on the horizon for edHEALTH.
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