Our experts are closely monitoring eight healthcare trends that are shaping industry leaders’ strategies in 2025.
And this year is especially interesting, as 2024’s U.S. election results could significantly shift healthcare policy and impact healthcare access, affordability, regulation, and innovation.
As such, forward-looking healthcare organizations (HCOs) that are on-track to differentiate their brand in the modern marketplace demonstrate some key characteristics:
- Pragmatically progressive strategies
- Strong partnerships to see those strategies through
Let’s dive into the eight healthcare trends and pragmatic innovations that our experts are helping HCOs navigate in 2025.
Healthcare Trend #1: AI Disruption and Enablement
Healthcare has seen a surge of interest in AI, with the market set to soar to $187.95 billion by 2030. But the industry faces unique challenges that other sectors don’t encounter. Strict regulations around HIPAA, PHI, and PII create significant barriers, making it difficult to adopt off-the-shelf AI solutions from fields like commerce or digital experience. These regulations demand that healthcare AI be specifically tailored to ensure data privacy, security, and compliance, limiting the utility of plug-and-play approaches seen in other industries.
Recommended Approach: AI should not be viewed as a standalone strategy but rather as a powerful enabler of broader business objectives. A well-formed strategy aligns key business priorities with organizational capabilities – people, technology, and processes – to create a cohesive framework. AI’s transformative potential can then be harnessed to address high-impact use cases for HCOs that are defined by clear KPIs and measurable outcomes. However, this potential can only be fully realized if AI is implemented with careful consideration of ethical, security and privacy, and oversight issues. This approach ensures that AI drives tangible value, tailored to the unique needs and strengths of the organization.
Success In Action: Accelerating CSR Support of Benefits Questions Using GenAI
Healthcare Trend #2: Cost Management Without Sacrificing Agility
HCOs continue to face substantial challenges in maintaining margins. While there are many macro and operational factors at play, cost management will play a key part in C-suite planning for the foreseeable future. Against this background, leaders are still under intense competitive pressure to improve many aspects of the digital experience. This tension is driving renewed interest in automation, including AI, and an emphasis on MVP+ and Agile delivery of everything from data modernization to websites and search.
Recommended Approach: Strategic cohesion is vital to ensure initiatives are supported by extremely clear goals and KPIs, and ultimately deliver business value and better health outcomes. A rigorous yet practical business transformation mindset has therefore never been more important. Leaders must prioritize technology investments that balance shorter-term wins and longer-range viability. Cost containment will require compromises. Thus, organizational alignment and change management become even more vital as teams competing for technology development dollars evolve their focus from departmental goals to enterprise sustainability.
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Healthcare Trend #3: Clinician Burnout and Patient Impacts
Approximately 63% of physicians report burnout at least once a week. Clinician burnout not only exacerbates staffing challenges and jeopardizes the health and well-being of frontline healthcare workers, it also poses critical risks to patient safety, care quality, and the long-term sustainability of HCOs. Burnout can lead to increased medical errors, compromised decision-making, and diminished patient-provider relationships, directly impacting the experience and outcomes for patients and potentially increasing insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses for members. Every departing nurse or physician deepens the cycle, as budget freezes and shortages in the workforce make it difficult, if not impossible, to replace these key personnel. As the pressure mounts, remaining staff and healthcare consumers all suffer – with longer wait times, reduced continuity of care, and overall diminished access to services, threatening the very stability of healthcare delivery systems.
Recommended Approach: Ease the burden on clinicians by first understanding teams’ day-to-day friction points. Engaging directly with end-users ensures their voices inform your modernization efforts, fostering a culture of collaboration that can drive meaningful change. This open dialogue cultivates powerful change advocates who will champion the adoption of digital investments, such as smart automation, trusted data, advanced analytics, and integrated consumer experiences. Furthermore, organizations must strategically engage and resonate with providers who are contemplating career transitions, ensuring that their needs and aspirations are addressed. These efforts not only contribute to your HCO’s bottom line but also enhance the overall experience for everyone—providers, patients, and caregivers alike. In both the short- and long-term, these initiatives will build trust within your consumer base, positioning your organization as a desirable destination for care and ultimately fostering a healthier, more engaged community.
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Healthcare Trend #4: Experiences That Build Trust
Research from Gallup showed consumers, in 2023, had some of the lowest levels of trust ever recorded in the healthcare industry. Although we are seeing levels of trust in HCOs begin to improve, they still have a long way to go. 2025 will see the continued push to meet healthcare consumers’ demand for convenience and personalized digital experiences.
Recommended Approach: From everyday commerce to the 2024 presidential election, we continue to see one clear fact: It’s imperative to know your audience. There is no “typical” healthcare consumer, and if you don’t treat people as individuals with unique, personal needs, you risk losing them to another HCO that does. Your organization must incorporate comprehensive healthcare personas and journeys to fully understand the people you serve, how they want you to communicate with them, and how they access your care or services — or risk losing them. Consider potential areas of mistrust for your organization and address them now to build consumers’ confidence. Key areas where we often help HCOs do just that are through digital front door strategies, implementation of intelligent search, and reimagining information architecture (IA).
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Healthcare Trend #5: Competition From Disruptive Healthcare Models
We’ve seen upheaval in the realm of healthcare disruptors — as Walmart has pulled out and Walgreens has pulled back, Best Buy has jumped in. Healthcare disruptors are finding out something traditional healthcare organizations (HCOs) have known for some time: Success in the healthcare industry is a complicated. But we are seeing disruptors to the traditional healthcare model find that success. Companies like Hims, Hers, and Henry Meds combine the best of empathetic, consumer-friendly language with convenient, powerful commerce experiences designed to help users way find and convert quickly.
Recommended Approach: Traditional HCOs that want to compete against successful disruptors require thoughtful, thorough business transformation. Take stock of your organization’s KPIs and how you are measuring success. Are you driving toward growth? If so, is it the right kind of growth to stand out? Next, determine whether you’re meeting the evolving expectations of today’s healthcare consumers. Be mindful of considerations around health equity and social determinants of health (SDOH) and align your strategies to match. Ultimately, we’re seeing powerful outcomes from organizations that shift from a project-focused model to a product-driven approach. Product-driven healthcare enables greater agility to respond to market shifts and fluctuations, as well as industry trends, the uncertainty of changes in healthcare regulation, and the demands of today’s consumers.
Read More: Is Your Healthcare Organization Really Product-Driven?
Healthcare Trend #6: Better Health Outcomes Through Shared Health Data
Efforts to reduce costs and improve health outcomes are driving collaboration among HCOs as health plans and integrated systems aim to more-holistically support consumer health, ease the care journey, and reduce the cost of care. Clinical data spanning an individual’s various provider relationships is crucial for a comprehensive patient view. Meanwhile, leaders continue to explore ways AI and automation can illuminate a 360-degree consumer view to power personalization, boost retention, and increase business resilience. These discussions are forcing focus toward data quality, consistency, governance, and bias.
Recommended Approach: Cloud services’ importance has surged to meet the growing need for real-time, accessible data. We recommend that HCOs continue building a scalable foundation to connect and integrate consumer data across health systems, providers, and insurers. This requires focus in several key areas, including data integration, data management. and data consistency and quality. Only then can data be richly woven into a reliable 360-degree view of the consumer that spans and supports better care management, marketing engagement, and support services. To optimize costs, we anticipate increasing adoption of data virtualization (a.k.a., Data as a Service, or DaaS). This unified data access layer approach bypasses the need to replicate data across various patient and member data management systems (e.g., data warehouses, MarTech, contact center, etc.), and offers a single view of enriched and transformed data from multiple data sources.
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Healthcare Trend #7: Care For the Aging and Underserved
An aging consumer base and a growing emphasis on health equity are reshaping patient engagement and business models for HCOs. According to the National Institute on Aging, approximately 85% of older adults have at least one chronic health condition, and 60% have at least two chronic conditions. In response, health insurers intensified focus on Medicare Advantage and Medicaid managed care plans to effectively serve a more diverse and underserved member population. Concurrently, providers are expanding into digitally connected services, such as telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and personalized care plans, enabling patients to manage their health in more convenient and accessible settings. These shifts not only enhance patient experience and satisfaction but also foster a more inclusive healthcare system that addresses the unique needs of various demographic groups.
Recommended Approach: Deeply understand your patients’ and members’ journeys so you can deliver differentiated digital experiences in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Improve brand affinity with intuitive, personalized, accessible care moments that build trust (and bolster Star ratings). Intelligently automate systems and processes to optimize costs and build margin that can buffer potential shifts in reimbursement models. The integration of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) data adds value by addressing factors like transportation, housing, and food security that impact health outcomes. Through a surround-care approach, powered with important health insights and intuitive tools, HCOs can strengthen community and individual health. This comprehensive strategy enhances engagement and trust while promoting better health outcomes and equity across diverse populations.
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Healthcare Trend #8: Mandate-Driven Transformation
Regulatory mandates continue to drive significant investment and effort from all HCO’s. Leaders strive to meet evolving requirements in CMS interoperability and prior authorization, price transparency, TEFCA, and others. Meanwhile, HHS insight on PHI and legal cases muddy the waters of HIPAA. In general, the effort to understand expectations, implement new functionality, and abide by existing mandates continues to increase. These mandates may seem simple at first, but they have significant implications as insurers work to incorporate patient data using standards common to the provider world. HCOs cannot simply repurpose hastily-constructed solutions from earlier mandates as a foundation for future compliance. Upcoming mandates are meant to build upon those that came before. Without a scalable approach and a thoughtful architecture, HCO’s will find themselves with an ever-increasing debt burden.
Recommended Approach: We encourage leaders to identify mandates’ silver lining opportunities. After all, to remain competitive and compliant, HCOs must innovate in ways that add business value, meet consumers’ evolving expectations, build trust, and deliver equitable care and services. Achieving transformative outcomes and health experiences requires a digital strategy that not only satisfies mandates but also aligns the enterprise around a shared vision and actionable KPIs, ultimately keeping patients, members, and care teams at the heart of progress.
Therefore, we recommend that HCOs approach mandates as a set of iterations, using a strategy-first approach that holistically considers the broader mandate and regulatory landscape. Keep a pulse on what other healthcare organizations – especially new market entrants and disruptors – are doing. Adapt digital best practices from outside of the healthcare industry. And deeply understand the nuance of interoperability standards, patient data modeling, API gateways, and SMART on FHIR applications.
The most successful organizations will build a proper foundation that scales and supports successive mandates. Composable architecture offers a powerful, flexible approach that balances “best in breed,” fit-for-purpose solutions while bypassing unneeded, costly features or services. Tactically, organizations can accelerate value, privacy, and data quality with secure, compliant, and modern technology platforms and data architectures. It’s also vital to build trust in data and with consumers, paving the way for ubiquitous, fact-based decision making that supports health and enables relationships across the care continuum.
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Expert Digital Healthcare Consulting Services: Imagine, Create, Engineer, Run
In this next decade, advances in digital health, growing consumerism, and mounting financial constraints will propel how HCOs shape experiences and deliver equitable, high-quality, cost-effective care.
Perficient combines strategy, industry best practices, and technology expertise to deliver award-winning results for leading health plans and providers:
- Business Transformation: Activate strategy for transformative outcomes and health experiences.
- Modernization: Maximize technology to drive health innovation, efficiency, and interoperability.
- Data Analytics: Power enterprise agility and accelerate healthcare insights.
- Consumer Experience: Connect, ease, and elevate impactful health journeys.
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