Season 14 • Episode 406

Malta's primary care after the EPR: data governance, AI and the EHDS (Stefan Buttigieg)

Episode Description

Malta's health centres settled the digitisation question years ago. The harder work, Dr Stefan Buttigieg argues, starts now.

Malta's public primary care has run on an electronic patient record since its rollout began in late 2019. With the European Health Data Space now moving from regulation to implementation, the question in Maltese health centres is no longer whether to digitise but what a mature record should do next. Dr Stefan Buttigieg, who first joined Faces of Digital Health in 2019 to discuss Malta as a gateway to the European market, returns after moving from national eHealth work into Primary HealthCare. He sets out why data governance has to come before AI, why AI implementation depends on hardware and care pathways as much as software, and why he would rather build tools clinicians never need to be trained on.

Guest

Dr Stefan Buttigieg – Specialist in Public Health Medicine, Ministry for Health and Active Ageing, Malta (Primary HealthCare); creator of the EHDS Explorer

Host

Tjaša Zajc – Founder, Faces of Digital Health

What the conversation covers

• EHDS implementation in primary care: from national policy to the clinic

• Malta's electronic patient record for primary care, seven years on

• MyHealth@EU and cross-border patient summaries since 2019

• Setting up a national contact point for eHealth: the small-state advantage

• The EHDS Explorer: an independent, vibe-coded guide to the regulation and member-state implementation tracking

• Digital health authorities and health data access bodies ahead of March 2027

• Health data governance and data quality as the precondition for AI

• AI in breast screening, ophthalmology and diabetes care

• Why AI implementation depends on hardware, integration and the care pathway