
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries across the globe, and healthcare is no exception. From revolutionizing patient care to streamlining operations, AI technologies are poised to unlock immense value in healthcare. Nearly 90% of health system leaders have reported that digital and AI transformation is a high or top priority, but 75% reported that their organizations are not yet able to deliver on that. As we kick off 2025, healthcare leaders should consider leveraging the transformative capabilities of AI and stay in tune with the trends that will define its role in the healthcare ecosystem.
AI in healthcare: What it can do
The origins of AI date back to the 1950s, with healthcare beginning to leverage it for clinical purposes, such as aiding in diagnoses and treatment recommendations, in the 1970s. The 21st century has brought enormous proliferation in AI capabilities, however, with innovations being made across the entire healthcare ecosystem, impacting patient care, patient engagement, and healthcare operations. Today, AI is transforming healthcare in several ways:
- Enhancing diagnostics and guiding treatment: AI algorithms excel in pattern recognition, making them invaluable in diagnostics. For example, machine learning (ML) models can analyze medical images to detect conditions like cancer, heart disease, and neurological disorders with remarkable accuracy. These tools can assist radiologists and pathologists in making faster and more precise diagnoses and outcome predictions.
- Personalized medicine: AI enables a shift from one-size-fits-all treatments to personalized care, a rapidly expanding field of practice. By analyzing genetic information, lifestyle data, and patient history, AI can identify optimal preventative treatment plans for individuals, increasing efficacy and reducing side effects.
- Reducing clinician burnout: While clinician burnout has fallen below 50% for the first time since 2020, AI has the tremendous potential to improve clinician satisfaction and reduce burnout even further. As clinicians are being inundated with patient portal messaging, AI can be leveraged in several ways to reduce pajama time. It can analyze messages, organizing them and flagging information that would be critical to a patient’s care. Large language models (LLMs) can also be used to compose personalized messages back to patients. As electronic health record (EHR) documentation has become increasingly burdensome, use of ambient AI scribes can reduce documentation workload and improve patient interactions. A recent study from The Permanente Medical Group has discovered that using AI scribes saved most of the clinicians using it an average of one hour a day of documentation.
- Predictive analytics: From a clinical perspective, predictive models powered by AI can anticipate patient outcomes, readmission risks, and disease progression. These models can also be leveraged by operations to anticipate capacity, turnover, and burnout. Health systems are using these insights to allocate resources more effectively and intervene proactively, driving financial and clinical improvements.
- Streamlining operations and increasing financial opportunities: As healthcare systems continue to look for ways to reduce costs and improve their bottom lines, natural language processing (NLP) and AI-driven automation can simplify mundane, repetitive administrative tasks such as scheduling, billing, and medical coding, lowering burdensome administrative costs. It can improve patient flow management, reducing the burden on staff and allowing them to focus on patient care and accelerating strategic initiatives. AI can also uncover financial improvement opportunities within the revenue cycle by increasing capacity and reducing errors.
- Virtual health assistants: As workforce shortages continue to impact healthcare, chatbots and virtual assistants have become a viable solution while improving patient engagement by answering queries, scheduling appointments, and even offering mental health support through conversational AI.
AI trends to expect in healthcare in 2025
As the AI evolution compounds, healthcare leaders will need to consider not only how they prepare for the technological side of these advancements, but how these innovations affect the organization holistically. In 2025, we anticipate several rising trends to escalate even further:
- The rise of AI agents: Agents and agentic workflows will be on the rise in healthcare. Agents have the potential to unlock incredible efficiencies across the healthcare workforce, reducing burden and lessening personnel strain.
- The emergence of the chief AI officer: With the proliferation of AI solutions across every domain and department of healthcare, we are already seeing, and will continue to see, an increase in a new role: the chief of AI. As organizations begin to embrace this role, the use of AI will only continue to spread throughout the entire ecosystem, with AI-related roles increasing industry-wide as a result. It will be interesting to witness the relational structure of the chief AI role with the other “chiefs” in the data, analytics, and digital verticals.
- Continued regulatory advancements: In 2025, regulatory frameworks will likely become more robust, providing clearer guidance on the responsible use of AI in healthcare. The Coalition for Health AI is one such organization that is working to roll out a certification process and model cards to streamline AI innovation while ensuring trust, safety, ethics, and equitability.
- Expansion of ambient AI: Using ambient AI to document clinical conversations will be a core strategy for most health systems to reduce clinician burnout and improve documentation quality. Other ambient AI use cases may gain traction but may not become as mainstream.
- AI-infused workflows: Like-minded technologies, such as co-pilot and Gemini, along with EHR, ERP, and other software providers, will increasingly deliver solutions to drive day-to-day operational efficiencies for end users. AI solutions will help users retrieve information more easily, document faster, and work smarter.
- Integration of AI with wearable devices: Wearable technologies — from smartwatches to fitness trackers — are becoming a cornerstone of proactive and preventative healthcare. In 2025, expect increased integration of AI with EHRs to analyze real-time data from these devices to remotely monitor patients with chronic conditions, detect anomalies, and provide actionable health insights.
- AI-powered remote care: Telehealth will continue to evolve and expand, with AI enabling more sophisticated remote diagnostics and treatment plans. Advanced algorithms will empower clinicians to assess patients virtually. This will have a tremendous impact on underserved and/or rural communities.
- AI in mental health: Mental health care is set to benefit from AI through apps and platforms that use NLP to identify signs of anxiety, depression, or stress. Personalized interventions based on AI assessments will become more widespread.
Challenges and the road ahead
While the potential of AI in healthcare is immense, challenges remain. Data security, patient privacy, and the need for standardized regulations are critical issues. Likewise, the integration of AI into existing workflows requires cultural and infrastructural shifts.
Despite these challenges, the outlook for AI in healthcare is incredibly bright. While the industry continues to struggle with workforce shortages, the focus of AI should be on enabling employees to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently and not removing the human element. By embracing innovation responsibly, the industry can harness AI to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, reduce user burnout by enabling them to work smarter, and ultimately, create a more equitable healthcare system.
AI is not just a tool for healthcare; it’s a catalyst for organizational transformation. As we look toward 2025, the integration of AI into healthcare promises to redefine operations as well as diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Staying on top of these trends and embracing the potential of AI will be essential for healthcare providers, policymakers, and patients alike. The future of healthcare is intelligent, connected, and patient-centric.