In 2024, the healthcare industry faced a complex environment marked by financial pressures, physician burnout, labor shortages, and rapid technological advancements. This resulted in digital transformation, with a focus on personalized medicine and workforce optimization, as organizations worked to improve patient outcomes and reduce operational costs.
Key challenges like staffing shortages, data security concerns, and the integration of AI technologies demand a proactive approach. Despite the challenges, the industry has shown resilience, adapting and evolving in ways that offer hope for meaningful progress.
Now, leaders are looking to 2025, anticipating a shift in organizations' investments in advanced training, enhancement of cybersecurity protocols, and a priority placed on seamless tech adoption.
Looking forward to 2025, these efforts position healthcare providers to deliver smarter, more efficient care, harnessing innovation to create a more resilient, patient-centered system.
The following predictions highlight key considerations from Health Catalyst’s leadership team, emphasizing critical opportunities for hospitals and health systems.
“2025 will be an important year of maturation in the adoption of new cross-industry technology capabilities in healthcare, especially AI. The industry will make meaningful progress moving through Gartner’s technology hype cycle, with the most traction in AI use cases involving less headline-grabbing examples and more practical and pragmatic improvements in decision support and in the offloading of administrative and repetitive tasks and processes.
Healthcare organizations will also continue to recover financially and return to more of a state of normalcy, akin to pre-COVID and pre-high-inflation levels, while the United States also adjusts to the updated priorities of a Republican-led administration and Congress.”
“In 2025, I anticipate that operating margins will continue to improve and stabilize. I expect a reinvigoration around leveraging technology to drive transformation in care design and delivery. AI will be top of mind for automation to further minimize dependency on high-cost labor.
The continued migration of care from inpatient to outpatient settings will put increasing pressure on hospitals to shift care models for survival, leading to continued consolidation. Healthcare tech will also see consolidation, and care providers will look to simplify their tech portfolio with key strategic vendor partners.”
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“In 2025, AI-powered healthcare transformation will cross into ‘must-have’ territory. While AI has been at the forefront of the ongoing hype cycle, the ability to leverage AI across several key areas will significantly impact healthcare revenues, cost, and quality outcomes. Organizations that are forward-thinking enough to widely deploy AI within ‘known good’ use cases will reduce administrative waste and increase the reliability of the care they deliver.”
“When we speak with healthcare leaders, an increasing trend is the request to ‘have AI do the things I don't like doing.’ A specific example was akin to the dishes. ‘Dishes’ may be a stretch in 2025, but we are seeing increasing evidence of AI's ability tor educe administrative burden—especially on clinicians. Reducing administrative angst and cost would be an essential trend reversal for healthcare.
We need to ensure that the change to which we aspire is measured. This is a key role of healthcare leaders because it depends on setting expectations and building culture. For leaders in their work, we are building tools to reduce administrative harm as described in "Identifying and MeasuringAdministrative Harms Experienced by Hospitalists and Administrative Leaders," written by researchers led by Marisha Burden, MD,MBA.”
“As the U.S. population continues to age, the tail end of baby boomers (born 1946-1964) enter the ranks of Medicare, and the average life expectancy for both sexes hovers at 77.5 years, the financial constraints on Medicare and the Federal budget will become even greater.
At the same time, the ability to attract and retain skilled healthcare providers and support staff continues to be a major concern in most communities, with even greater shortages predicted in the coming years. We can expect to see a vicious cycle of widening ‘gaps in care,’ decreasing quality measures performance (CMSSTAR Ratings, MIPS Scores, ACO Quality Measure Benchmarks, Performance), decreasing reimbursement (per patient), and limitations of financial reimbursement and healthcare resources.
To succeed in 2025 and beyond, hospitals, healthcare systems, healthcare providers, and support staff will need to embrace and implement automated closure of gaps.
Hospitals and health systems will have to navigate integrating their data acquisition, storage, analytics, and measures reporting with automated triggering of evidence-based preventive care, order entry, and secure, personalized messaging to make headway in closing care gaps.”
“The increasing frequency of Ransomware in healthcare organizations will necessitate budget increases for Cybersecurity teams to invest in implementing more adequate preventative and recovery controls. Business resilience and recovery testing should include vendors’ testing recovery points and time objectives to prove an organization's metrics for reconstituting losses in such attacks.
Use cases for AI within Cybersecurity for defensive purposes will continue to rise in response to offensive attacks. Attribute-based access control (ABAC) will spread in prominence over role-based access control (RBAC).”
“One of the areas where AI can and will have the biggest impact that we’ll see making its way into health systems in the coming year is streamlining communication workflows. For tasks that involve communicating essential patient information, this process can be made considerably more efficient, reliable, and accurate by leveraging AI to summarize and capture relevant information about a patient as it relates to the specific types of outreaches, e.g., referral management, consultation requests, patient handoff, discharge planning, etc.
Today, these processes require the provider to spend time searching through and reviewing a patient’s chart and then reaching out to corresponding providers to ask follow-up questions, which can involve several rounds of back-and-forth. Over the course of a day, this can add up to a meaningful amount of time spent collecting information that could otherwise be pulled together using modern tooling like Generative AI, saving time for providers and ultimately resulting in better patient care.
While I’m bullish that this type of technology will make its way into the mainstream in the near future, it will take time to build provider trust.”
Looking ahead to 2025, Health Catalyst leaders share a unified vision for transforming the healthcare landscape despite persistent challenges. Focusing on cybersecurity, embedding AI in essential operations, closing gaps in care, and harnessing technology to enhance efficiency, healthcare organizations can be positioned to strengthen resilience, boost effectiveness, and prioritize patient-centered care.
These forward-looking perspectives reflect a commitment to innovation and adaptability, paving the way for more robust healthcare outcomes, operational resilience, and enriched patient experiences. As the industry advances, it is clear that healthcare's future belongs to those ready to drive change, make strategic investments, and balance technological progress with a focus on human-centered care.
