Husein Reka is a senior advisor to Secretary General for Health Financing, Policy and Innovation at the Council of Cooperative Health Insurance, a health insurance regulator of Saudi Arabia. Earlier, he served as chief transformation officer at the Program for Health Assurance and Purchasing of the Ministry of Health of Saudi Arabia. While there, he was responsible for the overall development and implementation of a new healthcare financing scheme in the country as part of the national Vision 2030.

Over the past 12 years, he has been involved in healthcare reform projects in the Arabian Gulf region and beyond. The most extensive of this was the healthcare financing reform in Qatar, where he served for over eight years, and in Kuwait, reviewing the health system and public health strategy. Most recently, he has been working on the reforms in Saudi Arabia, currently the world’s largest transformation of a national health system.

Prior to this, Husein was director at the Health Insurance Fund of Macedonia where he was responsible for international health insurance. Husein also worked as a consultant focusing on health economics at a specialist firm in London. His expert domains are international health policy, health financing, and health economics. Husein has co-authored several papers on access, utilisation and health system responsiveness, and risk factors.

Husein holds a bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy from St. Cyril and Methodius. He also holds a graduate diploma in Health Economics from the University of York, a master’s degree in International Health Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Chevening Scholar, and an MBA from Imperial College Business School.

His research as an AsiaGlobal Fellow focused on reviewing a health system of choice and assessing achievements in the efforts to achieve universal health coverage and challenges towards this goal in the Far East region.