Is a medical doctor specialized in Community Health and Management from the University of London. He has had a national and international career. His national professional footprint can be followed in several documents on social policy and health management addressed to the European, Spanish and Basque Parliaments. He co-authored the Abril report on healthcare in 1991 and the ESADE report in 1997 and Osasuna Zainduz. In the international field, he has worked for fifteen years at the World Health Organization, where he headed the Chronic Diseases Directorate and later the Health Systems Directorate until 2007. He was vice-president of Horizon 2020 of the European Union.
In 2009, he was appointed Minister of Health and Consumer Affairs of the Basque Government from where he led the transformation of healthcare from a hospital model to a more community-based model, from one focused on the disease to a more proactive, technological, and preventive model focused on the needs of chronic patients. He has advised numerous governments on health policy and most recently led in Northern Ireland on the report for the transformation of the health and social system; “Systems, Not Structures” (2017). He is a Senior Fellow at Harvard and Honorary Fellow at the University of Ulster.