Health Catalyst leaders share 2025 predictions

In 2024, the healthcare industry faced a complex environment marked by financial pressures, physician burnout, labor shortages and rapid technological advancements.

Despite the challenges, the industry has shown resilience, adapting and evolving in ways that offer hope for meaningful progress.

The following predictions highlight key considerations from Health Catalyst’s leadership team, emphasizing critical opportunities for hospitals and health systems.

AI use cases will mature, enabling practical and pragmatic improvements

Dan Burton, Health Catalyst Chief Executive Officer

“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 US also adjusts to the updated priorities of a Republican-led administration and Congress.”

Health tech will experience a reinvigoration in 2025

Dan LeSueur, Health Catalyst Chief Operating Officer

“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.”

AI deployment within ‘known good’ use cases will reduce waste and increase reliability

Dave Ross, Health Catalyst Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer

“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 revenue, cost, quality and 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.”

Measuring progress, setting expectations will be key for leaders when leveraging AI

Jason Jones, Health Catalyst Chief Analytics and Data Science Officer

“We are seeing increasing evidence of AI's ability to reduce 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 Measuring Administrative Harms Experienced by Hospitalists and Administrative Leaders," written by researchers led by Marisha Burden, MD, MBA.”

Leveraging AI will lead to significant success in streamlined communications

Daniel Samarov, Health Catalyst Vice President of Data Science Solutions

“One of the areas where AI will have the biggest impact on 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, such as referral management, consultation requests, patient handoff, and discharge planning.

“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.”

Embracing automation is key to closing care gaps

Shounak Lahiri, Health Catalyst Senior Vice President of Global Solutions

“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.”

Organizations will bolster cybersecurity measures

Kevin Scharnhorst, Health Catalyst Chief Information Security Officer

“The increasing frequency of ransomware in healthcare organizations will necessitate budget increases for cybersecurity teams so they can invest in implementing more adequate preventive 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).”

Positioning for resilience

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.