Throughout 2025 our radio and podcast hosts brought us discussions about the latest insights, breakthroughs, and trends shaping the healthcare landscape. As we embark on another year of changes and advancements, we asked them, what major event, transformation, or innovation in 2025 had a lasting impact on healthcare, whether positive or negative, and is likely to shape its future trajectory?
Here is what they had to say.
Justin Barnes, FHIMSS, Chief Executive Officer, Growth Performance
LinkedIn: Justin Barnes, FHIMSS
Host of This Just In
The most significant shift I saw in 2025 was how quickly AI moved from concept to bedside. It stopped being something leaders talked about in future terms and became part of daily clinical practice, supporting documentation, guiding decisions, and helping clinicians get time back. Across almost every This Just In Radio Show episode and every panel we hosted this year, the theme was the same: AI is now woven into care strategy, not sitting on the sidelines. Specifically, guests such as Rasu Shrestha, John Halamka, Jeff Buda, Geoff Brown, and Chris Paravate all shared real examples of where it is already working and where they are seeing meaningful improvements in quality and operations. What stood out was the confidence and clarity from these leaders; no one was speculating anymore. They were reporting measurable wins from projects already live in their organizations. The lasting impact of 2025 is that AI is now part of the clinical environment and health systems are building around it, not just planning for it.
Gil Bashe, Managing Partner, Chair Global Health, FINN Partners
LinkedIn: Gil Bashe
Host of Health UnaBASHEd
In 2025, the health sector pivoted unmistakably toward intelligent, data-driven care, marking a transformation that defines our future. This shift is not a niche evolution; it is a full-blown recalibration of what medicine becomes when machines, human insight and care converge. Take, for example, the rise of artificial intelligence in health: systems now outpace humans in detecting fractures, triaging emergencies, and analyzing imaging. At the same time, the business and delivery models are changing; care is no longer anchored exclusively in hospitals, but flowing toward the home, patient, and preventative, value-based systems. The potential is immense: better outcomes, lower costs, personalized medicine unshackled from one-size-fits-all. Yet, the flip side is painfully real: data governance, digital divides, and ethical oversight often lag behind technological advancements. If we ignore those fissures, this transformation will exacerbate inequities rather than heal. 2025 will be remembered as the year healthcare earned its digital backbone, and whether this evolving structure supports thriving health systems or accelerates medical inequities.
Frank Cutitta, Vice President, CHIME‘s Digital Health Insights
LinkedIn: Frank Cutitta
Host of Health Stealth Radio
My knee-jerk response would be the overwhelming acceptance of ambient with virtually every doctor on the radio and at our events saying it “brings the joy back to medicine and we want it faster”. Unheard of! However, the trend that is not as sexy but more profound is the fact that governance has become cool again! Considering the integration of AI into virtually every aspect of healthcare, governance is multifaceted and cross-functional, especially in the convergence of AI and Cybersecurity. The one other aspect of AI related to this is shadow AI, the ugly cousin of shadow IT. This is where digital health leaders have the unenviable job of reeling in hundreds of generative AI platforms being used by thousands of employees across the enterprise that could touch or extract private patient or financial information. Related to this is the evolution of AI prompt engineering to context engineering.
Matthew Fisher, Legal Guide and Counsel through Healthcare Regulatory Maze
LinkedIn: Matthew Fisher
Host of Healthcare de Jure
A big issue facing healthcare has been the ongoing split between states on the approach to different issues in healthcare. The splits are based on various causes, including political divisions and each state wanting to provide a perspective on issues. The political divide is creating tension in terms of federalism issues with states fighting over pursuing clinicians for rendering care while other states are protecting those same clinicians. Those legal problems will wind their way through the court system, but in the meantime the clinicians involved and patients are caught in the middle. On the front of an increasing number of states wanting to add a twist on an issue, the march toward 50 different privacy regulatory schemes continues. While the baselines of many of the laws are similar, there is just enough nuance that compliance becomes not jut a bit of a cost sink, but also a day to day operational complication. With the hope for any federal action dim, the compliance burdens will keep rising. All of these examples and others speak to a thorny legal landscape for some time yet.
Beth Friedman, FACHDM, Sr. Partner, FINN Partners
LinkedIn: Beth Friedman, FACHDM
Host of FINN Voices
Ambient clinical documentation easily takes the top spot as the most transformative health tech innovation of 2025. While the technology has been developing for several years, the advances made over the past year are set to leave a lasting mark—reshaping how physicians and nurses capture and manage clinical information for years to come.
But ambient clinical documentation isn’t just a win for physicians. It’s also a game changer for downstream revenue cycle processes such as billing, coding, and claims. Health operations teams benefit from more complete, timely reports. I expect stronger (and faster) clinical documentation may also help reduce payer denials, supporting more stable and predictable reimbursement streams.
Two decades ago, physicians were burning out, and even retiring, because we forced them to use EHRs for clinical documentation. Now, according to several panelists at a recent national health IT event, some physicians say they’ll quit unless health systems offer ambient documentation tools.
Next up: extending ambient documentation to nursing teams. I expect similar results, more joy, less cognitive load, and fewer late-night charting sessions.
Fred Goldstein, President and Founder, Accountable Health, LLC
Linkedin: Fred Goldstein
Host of PopHealth Week
Host of Unscripted The AMCP Podcast
The complete overhaul of the government. The changes at HHS, FDA, and CDC will have severe negative impacts on the health of those who live in the United States. From an increase in diseases that were once thought eradicated, to cockamamie ideas on causes and treatments for diseases and conditions, to the defunding of safety net programs. The results will be negative and last for decades. Additionally, the efforts to defund Universities, change education and fire expert committee members will result in the US losing its scientific and technological lead in many areas, but particularly in health and healthcare.
John Lynn, Founder, Swaay.Health
LinkedIn: John Lynn
Host of Healthcare IT Today
While AI will be the biggest even by far, that kind of started in 2024. For 2025, I’d say the most impactful thing to happen was giving information blocking teeth. That happened through some government efforts, but also through a number of legal cases related to information blocking. The shift in mindset by the systems of records which in healthcare are led by EHR software vendors has been astounding to watch. EHR vendors’ willingness to let you access and use their data in third party applications is a massive change that’s going to have far reaching impacts. While the data in EHRs still isn’t as accessible as most healthcare IT companies and their users would like, at least now the EHR can’t block you from accessing that information even if it’s through some sort of robotic process automation. Plus, for the higher volume use cases, this is going to force EHRs to develop high quality APIs. This shift in availability of EHR data is going to enable a lot of innovation. It does come with some risk that we should be aware of, but on the whole I believe the innovation that comes from this data being available will far outweigh the risks.
Daniel J. Marino, Managing Partner, Lumina Health Partners
LinkedIn: Daniel J. Marino
Host of Value-Based Care Insights
The single biggest issue facing hospitals and physicians in 2025 has been the rapid, uneven integration of generative AI into clinical and administrative workflows, which has simultaneously promised relief from cost and labor pressures while introducing new operational, financial, and liability risks. In 2025, health systems accelerated deployment of AI for documentation, ambient listening, coding, prior authorization, patient triage, and clinical decision support in response to persistent workforce shortages, clinician burnout, and margin compression. Although a very active pace of deployment, this pace outstripped governance, interoperability, expense reduction, and reimbursement frameworks. While early adopters saw gains in productivity and reduced administrative burdens (especially in revenue cycle), others struggled with model accuracy, bias, EHR integration challenges, and rising medical-legal concerns about AI-influenced clinical decisions. Payers began scrutinizing AI-assisted billing and utilization patterns, creating uncertainty around revenue integrity, while regulators signaled tighter oversight without yet providing clear standards. This transformation matters heading into 2026 because AI has become structurally embedded in care delivery and financial operations. Hospitals and physicians that fail to mature their AI governance, data strategy, and clinician trust risk falling behind competitively, while those that overextend without safeguards face financial losses and patient safety exposure.
Gregg Anthony Masters, MPH, Managing Director, Health Innovation Media
LinkedIn: Gregg Masters, MPH
Executive Producer & co-host of PopHealth Week
Executive Producer & co-host of Health UnaBASHEd
The singular “impact event” of 2025 has been the politicization and destabilization of U.S. public health leadership at the very moment competence and continuity are most needed, against a backdrop of a structurally mispriced “sickcare” economy: in 2023 the U.S. spent about $4.9T on health care (≈ $14,570 per person; 17.6% of GDP) while federal public health spending fell sharply as pandemic-era funds expired (down 58.3% from $90.2B in 2022 to $37.6B in 2023), and CDC’s FY2025 budget request was $9.683B, a rounding error compared with the trillions spent treating disease after it matures. That underfunded prevention and surveillance backbone has now been hit by operational and governance shocks: USAID was dismantled following the 2025 foreign-aid review (with courts finding DOGE-linked actions likely unlawful), impairing a core global health delivery and surveillance apparatus whose disruption is associated with catastrophic projected mortality (including Lancet-linked estimates warning of >14 million additional deaths by 2030 under severe cut scenarios), while immunization governance was destabilized when HHS removed all 17 ACIP members on June 9, 2025 – an action with real-world implications because ACIP recommendations are tightly linked to vaccine coverage and access across payers. Bottom line: the nation’s public health infrastructure, already treated as a political punching bag and fiscal afterthought relative to the acute care “non-system”, is perilously compromised and may take a generation to rebuild; for the full long-form, sourced analysis and timeline, see my post on ACOwatch.com.
Adam V. Russo, Esq., Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, The Phia Group, LLC
LinkedIn: Adam Russo
Host of Health Cent$
Last March, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) report on the Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR) process under the No Surprises Act (NSA) covered data from 2023 through Q2 2024. The report and subsequent analyses indicated that dispute volumes were far greater than projected and that providers were prevailing overwhelmingly, with potential implications for healthcare costs borne by employers and patients. Reports note that dispute volumes have increased more than seventyfold relative to initial expectations, and by mid-2025 the system had processed roughly 1.4 million disputes with hundreds of thousands still outstanding, suggesting a mismatch between the program’s design and the volume of cases it must handle. Commentators also point out that because arbitrators select between two payment offers, awards can be several times higher than typical in network rates. These higher awards may be contributing to increasing healthcare spending and premium costs. In addition, analyses show program costs have exceeded $1 billion and are rising faster than dispute volume, so employers and insurers may be bearing not only higher claim amounts but also substantial arbitration expenses. Some observers also note that private equity backed providers are prominent users of the system and that the identities of arbitrators and the rationale for their decisions are not disclosed. Because IDR decisions are generally final and unappealable except in cases of fraud, critics argue there is little opportunity for outside review or oversight.
In short, while the NSA has protected patients from balance billing, the federal IDR system designed to settle payment disputes appears to be inundated with cases, and reports raise concerns about its transparency, effectiveness, and potential impact on costs for employers and consumers.
Shahid Shah, Fractional CTO / EiR / CISO serving Gov’t, Health, Med Devices clients
LinkedIn: Shahid Shah
Host of Trending NOW
2025 was the year AI went from fascination to eye-rolling hype to being seen as possible and defensible by clinicians, administrators, and executives alike. In short, AI has “jumped the shark” in a few narrow but genuinely useful ways: ambient documentation, workflow routing, and early-warning tools now work well enough to stay. There’s no going back, and the progress is real even if it’s not perfectly measurable.
Yet we’re still far from AI meaningfully improving life for patients or easing the load on families and caregivers. Some patients and loved ones have begun using AI on their own (to interpret results, manage conditions, or navigate care) but they’re largely doing it in the wilderness, without guidance. Clinicians rarely dare to engage or educate them for fear of liability or misinformation. The real transformation in 2026 and beyond isn’t technical, it’s cultural and relational: bridging that gap so AI can safely, transparently, and equitably help the cared-for, not just the caregivers.
Jim Tate, President, EMR Advocate
LinkedIn: Jim Tate
Host of The Tate Chronicles
Ambient AI is sweeping the US health system due to its ability to bring extreme value to the documentation of patient visits. Easy to adopt, most providers instantly grasp what it can do for them. The technology, often running on a smartphone, listens to the encounter and builds a visit note of amazing accuracy. Many providers tell me it saves them an hour or more of daily documentation time. But there can be a dark side here as the time saved is often used to see more patients. 2026 will bring this dilemma to the forefront: Will ambient AI bring relief to an already stressed provider, or will it just mean the wheel is turning faster? This is a human question, and it can’t be answered by a ChatGPT prompt.
Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
LinkedIn: Nick van Terheyden, MD, ACPA-C
Host of News You Can Use
The 2025 Budget reconciliation act that was passed into law in the summer will have long lasting impact to healthcare coverage. The lasting reduction in Medicaid funding will reduce coverage to some of the most vulnerable populations reducing community based coverage, closing services which may not recover for years. The act also impacts the Accountable Care Act marketplace likely reducing coverage for many unable to afford the escalating premiums. The increasing rates of uninsured will further tax an already stressed system and more importantly the clinicians working in it leading to further moral injury, shortages and untenable clinical environments especially in Emergency Medicine that has become the de-facto catch all safety net.