F027 Can Malta be a gateway to the European market? (Stefan Buttigieg)

 

Small island, nice weather, tight community. This could be a short description of Malta. The English speaking country with half a million people is looking optimistically at technological advancements in healthcare.

Because the country is small, the adoption of new digital solutions could be faster compared to bigger countries.

The impact of country size on eHealth

Many European countries have various successful national eHealth implementation stories, with patients having access to their discharge letters, ePrescriptions, and some form of a personal health record. The success can partially be connected to the fact that the smaller the country, the easier it is to achieve connectivity. Compared to the US it is much easier for Estonia, Slovenia, Italy or Portugal to offer it’s citizens a nationwide access to some form of data, simply because fewer stakeholders are involved in coordination and negotiation. And to be fair — if we would compare the United States to Europe as a whole, because of the size, Europeans are in the same boat as Americans when it comes to traveling to another part of the continent.

There is no uniform solution which would give Europeans access to their data if they seek medical care outside their country. Two important notes: an implementation of a European wide solution is harder to expect due to language barriers. Also, Europe-wide interoperability is perhaps not as urgently needed as in the US, since Europeans don’t relocate and move permanently as much as Americans. We do travel around for holidays though, and access to medical information can get useful in those cases.

Malta

In general, the public health picture of Malta seems shiny — Maltese life expectancy is high, and Maltese people spend on average close to 90% of their lifespan in good health, longer than in any other EU country.

Stefan Buttigieg, Specialist Trainee in Public Health Medicine with a special interest in Clinical Informatics, Social Media and Digital Health, and the co-chair of Health 2.0 Malta, believes Malta could be a perfect starting point for startups from outside of Europe interested in the European market. They could to test their solution on the island, see it follows all the European regulations, and scale in Europe.

Buttigieg believes in the bright future ahead, driven by AI, blockchain, and younger generations. He believes that millennials, who grew up with digital devices, will demand better digital support in healthcare, and this, in turn, drives development.

He is also convinced there is a lot of opportunities to improve public health with digital health. Wide availability of solutions can be a win-win situation — more data can be gathered, offering better insight, and faster improvement. We’ve seen such a scale with free Google solutions — from email, the search engine to maps.

Find the podcast in iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, Youtube or subscribe with RSS.

Some questions addressed in the podcast:

  • What is the state of healthcare and healthcare IT in Malta?

  • How big is the digital health community in Malta?

  • What is the funding situation like for digital health in Malta?

  • Is the national optimism and plans for digitilization driven by understanding or general hype of technologies such as artificial intelligence or blockchain?

 
Country ProfileTjasa ZajcDigital Health, Healthcare, Malta, StartupsComment