It is a frustration many of us know all too well: the incessant beeping of unanswered phones, the endless waiting, the feeling of being lost in a medical maze just when we need help the most. Patients deserve far more than to feel like numbers in a queue.
Dr Gege Gatt at EBO dares to imagine a different future for healthcare – one where human dignity takes centre stage, empowered by the full potential of cutting-edge technology.
He is a digital entrepreneur, an IT-Law expert, and an experienced director serving on a number of company boards. He’s passionate about AI, digital ethics, transformation, culture and strategy. Gege is a TEDx speaker, a lecturer, and specialist examiner at the University of Malta. He has won the UK’s Enterprise Awards in 2024, the 2024 Malta International Business Awards, and the UK’s healthcare HSJ Awards 2025.
He is the CEO of London-based company EBO, an artificial intelligence platform which is disrupting the customer engagement industry through data.
Gege has been appointed by the World Health Organisation as an academic reviewer of its Digital Health information system strategy.
Gege’s pro bono work includes a Board Member role within a Vatican initiative on technology and well-being in Rome: Humanity 2.0 for which he also mentored the first ever Vatican Hackathon.
NXTin.Health catches up with Dr Gatt about the dizzying growth of AI, patient-centred innovation, and his contribution to an initiative under the auspices of the Vatican.
He emphasises that while healthcare itself is complex, the patient experience need not be.
Gege, how does EBO position itself within the European digital health innovation ecosystem?
EBO sits at the interface between the patient and the healthcare system. We are not trying to replace an electronic health record, and we are not trying to replace a diagnostic or clinical solution. We are there to make access to healthcare, and navigation through it, easier.
That is the part that has been missing in global healthcare. For the last 50 years, healthcare solutions have been almost entirely hospital-facing and clinician-facing. But the world has changed. Patients want to be involved in their health. They wear connected devices and access health data on their phones. We saw a gap in the market, and our role is to remove the friction in the patient journey.
Where is that friction? Anywhere the process is high-volume and labour-intensive. Booking and managing appointments. Working through complex questionnaires, assessments and forms. Figuring out which service is right for your condition. Sitting on a waiting list and trying to understand when your turn will come. I describe what we offer as an intelligent patient interface: we use AI to absorb the enormous complexity of healthcare systems. Healthcare itself is complex, but the patient experience shouldn’t be.
Europe has many healthcare technology pilots, but innovation only matters when the technology survives beyond the pilot. After seven years of work, we are deployed in 24 of Europe’s largest hospitals, serving millions of citizens. Governance, clinical safety, regulatory compliance in each country and interoperability with existing systems are a very important part of what we do. In the UK, we are registered as a Class 1 medical device.
Our philosophy has always been that patients shouldn’t have to learn how to navigate healthcare, working out what to do first, second, third. The healthcare system should learn how to navigate around the patient. Every design choice we make, every algorithm we write and every sales campaign we launch is built around the needs of real patients.
Looking at the bigger picture, how does European health innovation compare with the United States and Asia? Where is Europe leading, and where is it falling behind?
That is the fundamental question. I’ve been in this industry for 25 years, and what I’ve observed is that Europe is very good at invention but not at all good at industrialising and distributing that invention.
We have excellent universities, clinicians and researchers. But we are unable to scale, and the European Commission has recognised this weakness. Funding systems are fragmented, regulation is complex, and market uptake is slow because Europe is risk-averse.
Compare that with the United States, which remains far stronger on access to capital and scale. In 2025, European healthcare companies raised only around a third of the venture capital their US peers did. And the problem is not at the startup stage.
Europe produces roughly the same number of early-stage healthcare startups as the US. The dramatic difference comes at scale-up: the US produces around seven times as many scale-up funding rounds. America excels at that growth curve: capital, then commercialisation, then rapid adoption, then a very large technology company. That is what we lack.
Asia is a different story. China, Singapore, the Gulf and the wider region have a willingness we don’t have in Europe to build at population scale and think in terms of national deployments. In Europe, we barely have local deployments in any one country, let alone continent-wide ones.
So where can Europe lead? I don’t think our advantage will be capital. It will be trustworthy technology. The EU AI Act is the right framework for data quality, safety and human oversight, and the European Health Data Space can become a very important tool, because we have the infrastructure to create very secure health data. In Europe we are trying to build technology based on trust and lawfulness, technology that can become national infrastructure. That is our competitive advantage, and trustworthy technology can scale. Patients don’t want to use an opaque AI tool. General-purpose AI models are very powerful, but they are often opaque about how your health data is used, where it is stored and whether it is training a model. I believe patients will increasingly choose trustworthy technology.
My conclusion is that Europe does not have an innovation deficit. We have bright young people with very good ideas. Our deficit is in scaling those ideas and turning them into revenue-generating opportunities faster: getting excellent science into everyday healthcare delivery.
Innovators, particularly in Medtech, often tell us that their biggest obstacle comes after the lab: taking an approved product across 27 markets with fragmented health systems and hospital procurement rules, or even getting into a clinical trial with a hospital partner. Have you faced the same barriers?
Absolutely, and not only within the European Union. Our primary market, the UK, is no longer an EU country. Data sovereignty rules are different, medical device rules are different, data protection works differently, and so do business culture and networks. Every country we operate in has its own structures.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Whichever country you are in, however different the regulatory environment, the pain point is the same: the system cannot communicate effectively with the patient or make it easy for the patient to manage and participate in their own wellbeing. That is a global problem.
So my advice is not to focus on the differences between countries but on the commonalities. When you understand the pain points and the root causes of why the system is broken, you can build a common solution that applies equally in the US, Asia, Europe, the UK and the Middle East.
Ultimately, you are addressing one of society’s largest unmet needs: the need to be seen as a person with your own needs and conditions. Nobody wants to be treated as a number. AI now gives us the chance to offer a personalised, patient-centric experience that was never possible before.
Here is one example. Wherever we operate, whether in the Middle East, Canada, Malta or the UK, there are issues with digital literacy and even cognitive literacy. A 60-year-old man may present with the cognitive capability of a ten-year-old. It is very common. You assume maturity, and it isn’t there. With AI, we can adapt the interaction to his level: assessment forms are simplified, and the wording we use to greet and signpost him is simplified too. Or the reverse, where needed. That brings us back to a central theme: using technology as a tool for social good, by finding the common problem across territories and addressing it through personalised care that meets each patient where they are.
Which aspects of patient engagement are suited to automation, and which should remain human-led?
My guiding principle is simple: automate the transaction, protect the relationship. AI is extremely good at repetitive, rule-based processes, at handling volume, with millions of patients passing through a funnel, and at anything with heavy friction and administration. Manage my bookings, reschedule my appointment, help me fill in this ADHD form, tell me where to find psychology services in my community. These high-friction areas are ready for AI; they no longer need to be human-led.
The real benefit is not cost reduction, the idea that three full-time roles are no longer needed. The benefit is capacity. When you take people out of repetitive processes, you free nurses to do the more important cognitive and human work with patients. The purpose of automating these processes is to rehumanise healthcare: give the robotic work to machines and give people back the time to care.
There is also accessibility. In the UK, we support healthcare in a hundred languages. Some people there don’t speak English, only Polish, for example. Technology now lets us offer a public good to anyone, in any language. People who were previously excluded are now included.
But there is a clear boundary, and in my mind it is a sharp black line, not a grey one. A diagnosis with ambiguity should be human. Delivering difficult news, palliative care, safeguarding minors, complex clinical judgement: all human. And any moral decision — whether to withdraw life support, whether to ask for a donor — cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Those decisions depend on empathy, values and lived experience, and you cannot hand them over to an AI tool. They require accountable human beings. AI can carry the workload, but humans must continue to carry the responsibility.
The objective is not a healthcare system without humans. It is a system in which people spend more time on what matters to them and to society, rather than on folding letters or having frontline nurses answer calls about rescheduled appointments.
You also sat on the board of Humanity 2.0, the Vatican initiative. Could you tell us more about it?
Humanity 2.0 is a human flourishing accelerator. It brings together sectors that traditionally operate separately: public institutions, private companies, academia, technology experts, philosophers and faith communities. Every year we meet at the Vatican, identify the main obstacles to human flourishing, and build collaborative solutions across those dimensions.
What interests me is how it reframes the AI question. Technologists usually ask whether something can be built. Businesses ask whether it can be monetised. Regulators ask how to govern it. A human flourishing perspective asks something more fundamental: will this ultimately make human life better? In the era of AI, that is sometimes the more important question.
Intelligence is becoming cheaper and more abundant. We can now do things at almost zero cost that were impossible three years ago. But wisdom, dignity, meaning, purpose and human agency don’t scale the way technology does. The conversations at Humanity 2.0 between technologists, philosophers, theologians, scientists and business leaders have produced ideas that translate directly into our work at EBO.
We don’t see a patient as a data point or a clinician as a unit of productivity. Efficiency is valuable, but our ultimate measure is human flourishing: making it easier for people to deal with hospitals so they can spend more time with their families and on what gives their lives meaning.
The most important question about AI is not how intelligent the machine can become. It is what kind of humanity we can build around it.
What comes next for EBO?
We have three major evolutions on our roadmap.
The first is moving from healthcare portals to healthcare front doors. Our single point of access and navigation solution uses AI to help patients work out where they need to go, instead of expecting them to understand how a hospital works. How do we speak to the right patient, in the right way, about the right service, at the right time? The front door of a hospital is no longer the physical entrance or the emergency department. Increasingly, it is an intelligent tool that guides access and navigation.
The second is moving from reactive waiting to continuous check-ins. Say you are waiting for a hip or knee replacement. In Malta that wait is just under a year; in Italy it can be three. Your condition may improve or deteriorate, and when your turn comes, you are called in. That model belongs to the 1950s: a queue, an administrator managing it, and you somewhere in the middle. Reactive healthcare has no place in 2030.
We want a dynamic relationship between patient and hospital: an AI agent that checks in regularly. Has your condition changed? How are you feeling? Do you need a review appointment or support while you wait? If your condition has worsened, can we escalate? Traditional waiting lists are where patients get lost, and some of them die. Before AI, this was impossible; no hospital could have nurses calling millions of patients every day. Now we have the tool to do it.
But she can call a freephone number from her landline and simply speak, at any time and in any language, to a service fully integrated with the hospital system, one that knows her record, her appointments and her concerns. Through voice, we want to dissolve the digital divide between those who can use technology and those who can’t.
The third is voice. We are working with Nvidia on low-latency, highly capable AI voice so that older patients with low digital literacy can use our solutions. If you asked your 90-year-old grandmother to use an app or a chat window, it wouldn’t happen.
Our roadmap is not really about building more impressive AI. It is about building a healthcare system that feels simpler to the patient, with the intelligence and complexity kept underneath. Healthcare is fundamentally a human endeavour. The promise of AI is to remove the friction from it, so patients have more time to be human, whatever that means to them.
Is there a time frame for these three pillars?
We want to deliver all three by 2030. It is a four-year plan, and we are pushing ahead with it. If life isn’t ambitious, it isn’t worth living.
Malta also seems to place a high value on human contact. The queue at the clinic is still a place to catch up with neighbours. Do you see it differently?
I think what looks traditional is really about access. One of the biggest differences between Malta and other European countries is that Malta still has doctors and nurses available. Elsewhere there is a serious shortage of clinicians. In Malta it is easy to see a GP; try doing that in London. Primary care in Malta still works, while in much of Europe it has collapsed.
The gap between demand and supply in Malta simply hasn’t reached its critical point yet. But it will. University admissions for clinicians are falling, and the population is ageing, living longer, demanding more from the healthcare system and becoming less healthy. Malta has high levels of obesity and cardiovascular disease, very low participation in sport, even walking, and poor nutrition. That will create a significant challenge for our public healthcare system in the years ahead.
Digitalisation can also be uneven in practice. A member of our team was recently prescribed a blood test that appeared online in her health records, yet the clinic asked her to return to the doctor for a printed referral before booking. Is this a familiar story?
It makes no sense, and we had similar problems in the UK. One of our largest projects was school immunisation. Before our technology, the Department of Health printed a consent form, sent it to the locality, which passed it to schools, then to teachers, then to the child, who took it home for the parents to sign. It got folded many times, the dog chewed the corner, and eventually it made its way back. Millions of times every year.
We introduced a fully digital, end-to-end process, and what used to take 13 weeks now takes 13 hours. The request reaches parents directly; they can ask questions about whether the vaccine is safe and suitable for their child; they give legal consent; it is written into the hospital system; the vaccine is ordered; and the appointment is scheduled. All automated with AI.
So there are alternatives. What it takes is the courage to make the political decisions that lead to change. Transformation in healthcare is ultimately not a technology discussion. It is a political one.
