Welcome back to the first Digital Health Wire of 2025! The healthcare news cycle might never sleep, but we hope our readers are heading into the new year well rested and ready for big things to come.
The past few weeks have had plenty of fortune tellers predicting what those big things will be, so we’re kicking the year off with a compilation of the clearest crystal balls.
Let’s get right into it.
Second Opinion – There’s about to be a lot of AI capital incineration, Chrissy Farr
- Favorite Forecast: AI startups will struggle if they don’t acknowledge that to sell into healthcare, you can’t ignore services. Until AI training is ubiquitous, startups will need their own teams to make it happen. Public healthcare “tech” companies have a service-heavy revenue mix for a reason.
- Big Idea: “We are overdoing it on AI and missing out on opportunities to invest in solid, services businesses that are truly helping patients… These businesses have extremely low valuations and are struggling to raise, relative to their peers in AI that have made zero traction.”
The Surgeon’s Record – 2025 The Year of the Wood Snake, Dr. Ben Schwartz
- Favorite Forecast: Care delivery innovation pivots from primary care to specialty care. Specialty care is extremely complex, with huge room for improvement from shifting sites of service, building new condition-specific treatment pathways, and aggregating high-quality networks.
- Big Idea: “The specialty care innovation movement is well underway… Maven Clinic… Oshi Health… Thyme Care… Commons Clinic… The common thread here? Embracing a hybrid specialty care model.”
Out-of-Pocket – Out-Of-Pocket’s 2025 Predictions, Nikhil Krishnan
- Favorite Forecast: Marketing becomes a mess. Meta is making some major healthcare advertising changes that make it difficult to actually target patients, and Google and LinkedIn could soon follow suit.
- Big Idea: “AI generated slop is starting to mess up search engine optimization rankings. 50% of people are little content piggies that are fine with the slop though.”
Hospitalogy – 8 Predictions for Healthcare 2025, Blake Madden
- Favorite Forecast: LLM advancements made back-office AI the talk of 2024, but this year could bring a surge in funding for clinical AI solutions.
- Big Idea: “The cost and complexity of processing unstructured clinical data, combined with low risk tolerance, have historically limited the adoption of clinical AI products. Fortunately, LLMs excel at more accurately interpreting unstructured / multi-modal data, and the cost of compute is decreasing. This sets the stage for AI to create more value in clinical workflows.”
Forbes – Anti-Predictions For Healthcare In 2025, Seth Joseph
- Favorite Forecast: Progress on data interoperability will continue, but painfully slowly. Everyone wants interoperability, but regulatory uncertainty and the rapid emergence of new data sources complicates the situation.
- Big Idea: “The politics of access to healthcare data will continue as if it’s a 6th grade student council election.” – Zus Health CEO Jonathan Bush
NeuroFlow – 2025 Healthcare Forecast, Ellen Harvey
- Favorite Forecast: Behavioral health will shift from access to impact. By collecting behavioral health data and merging it with physical health data, we’ll start to see which interventions truly reduce unnecessary utilization and improve outcomes.
- Big Idea: “The industry is finally shifting from asking ‘Do we have enough providers?’ to ‘Are our programs actually working?’ As healthcare costs continue to skyrocket, both public and private payers will demand proof that their behavioral health investments are paying off.” – NeuroFlow COO Robert Capobianco
The Takeaway
The healthcare industry has plenty of challenges, but it also has some strong tailwinds pushing it toward new solutions. Cheers to everyone making those solutions a reality in the new year.
