Healthcare Executives' Biggest Takeaways from 2025
AI went from hype to having a bigger impact in 2025, reshaping various aspects of healthcare from clinical workflows to digital discoverability, health executives told MobiHealthNews.
While sharing their biggest takeaways from 2025, health leaders, technologists and entrepreneurs point to a shift in productivity gains, deeper data integration and AI taking on tasks once handled manually. Still, they warn that the next wave will demand stronger validation, tighter integration and more human-centered oversight. Here are their takeaways from the year:
Eyal Zimlichman, founder and director of ARC and chief innovation, transformation and AI officer at Sheba Medical Center
The AI race continued in 2025, and the continued notion in the industry that AI is basically the solution to everything has created a frenzy for healthcare systems to implement solutions.
The problem is that there’s a significant gap between what AI solutions currently offer and the appetite of healthcare systems to embrace them, as solutions are often not yet 100% suited for widespread implementation. It requires training, adaptation and integrations, which are still lacking.
We're likely to see 2026 advance on these fronts, where the use of AI, especially for ambient and summarizing, is going to be implemented more broadly with integration and training to follow.
Cherry Drulis, director of healthcare mobile B2B for Samsung Electronics
2025 demonstrated the power of a truly connected ecosystem, where data, devices and intelligent technologies work together to improve experiences and outcomes across industries.
Within consumer electronics, enterprise operations, healthcare and beyond, organizations are embracing digital solutions that simplify complexity, strengthen collaboration and extend value beyond traditional capabilities. This connected foundation is enabling smarter, more adaptive solutions that put people at the center.
At the heart of this transformation was AI. AI continues to be critical in driving meaningful, real-world innovation, particularly in healthcare, where it’s helping ease the pressure on clinicians, surface the right insights at the right time and connect care across settings.
One of the more significant shifts I’ve seen has been the embedding of digital health tools right into provider workflows, enabling wellness data from both wearables and mobile devices to be integrated with clinical information. Integrating intelligence across systems – from wearable data to clinical records – is creating a more seamless flow of information that bridges daily health tracking and clinical care, expanding access and continuity of care beyond hospital walls.
As these capabilities mature, the focus is shifting toward building systems that are not simply intelligent, but also ethical, sustainable and human-centered. The continued convergence of AI with other connected technologies will lead us to a future where insights move effortlessly between people, places and platforms, ultimately allowing for more informed decisions, better outcomes and a truly connected continuum of care.
Dr. Ricky Bloomfield, chief medical officer at Oura
The real value of AI in healthcare comes not from the hype around generative models or buzzwords, but from combining high-quality, clinically validated data with AI algorithms to create meaningful, personalized health insights.
AI is not replacing clinicians but augmenting them, helping them analyze complex data, identify early signs of illness and deliver more actionable, individualized care.
AI-driven insights have moved beyond general guidance, providing personalized recommendations for sleep, activity, nutrition and chronic disease management.
Neil Patel, head of ventures at Redesign Health
Health systems re-emerged as a primary target for founders and entrepreneurs in 2025. This shift was fueled by the realization that AI can drive labor productivity gains, allowing startups to sell into health systems’ operational and labor budgets, a stark contrast to the long sales cycles and small IT budgets that many had previously sworn off. The core thesis (that AI would significantly reduce operating expenses through labor productivity) finally began to prove out.
This trend, combined with increasing uncertainty in the MA and MCO markets, drove the marked refocus. While the adage "follow the money" previously drew startups to pharma and payers as health systems contended with high pandemic-era labor costs, the tide has turned.
With labor costs stabilizing, founders are now "following the opportunity." Health systems, which hold the industry’s largest concentration of labor spend, have become the prime, defensible target for AI innovation.
Edmund Jackson, cofounder and CEO of UnityAI
Many of healthcare’s biggest problems are "last-mile" problems like engaging with patients, coordinating next steps and handling daily variability within facilities. All of that work used to be done manually, but 2025 was the year AI became capable of taking on those workloads at scale, and that’s a meaningful shift.
A second takeaway is just how fast the underlying tech is moving. For leaders outside of pure tech, keeping pace has become the hardest part, because there are announcements and product releases seemingly every day.
Ann Bilyew, president of WebMD Ignite
One of my biggest takeaways from 2025 is that healthcare has finally woken up to the fragility of its digital front door. AI overviews fundamentally reshaped how patients search for care, and for many organizations it exposed how dependent they were on traditional search behavior.
Traffic that used to reliably flow to providers is now being rerouted through AI summaries, which compress choices, flatten nuance and make differentiation much harder.
Another takeaway is that health systems can no longer separate "marketing" from "access." What used to be a branding question is now a care-delivery question: If patients can't find you, they can’t get to you. And in a year when labor shortages, shrinking margins and shifting benefit designs all converged, digital discoverability became a strategic asset—not a marketing function.
Roland Rott, president and CEO of imaging at GE HealthCare
Overall, 2025 has been a pivotal year for healthcare technology. We have witnessed a tangible shift of AI technology from experimental promise to practical application across the entire care pathway. We’re now at the point where we’re seeing scaled, real-world applications of AI in healthcare – not just pilot programs.
Over the past year, we’ve seen AI become instrumental in addressing healthcare system challenges, from helping to enhance diagnostic clarity to reducing patient wait times. And with these changes, we’re also seeing a strong focus on access and efficiency – as workforce shortages and cost pressures rise, these AI-powered solutions are helping clinicians do more with less without sacrificing quality.
These developments help underscore AI’s validated role in helping to drive efficiency and the potential to improve patient outcomes in a measurable way, reinforcing the recognition that innovation only matters if it has real impact and that technology for its own sake doesn’t move healthcare forward.
Shannon West, chief strategy officer at Datavant
Many of healthcare’s biggest challenges still trace back to how effectively data can move across systems, be interpreted in real time and be trusted by those who depend on it. Advances in digitization and automation are creating a flywheel effect for making the right data available to answer specific research questions and solve business problems faster – and with a confidence in the integrity of that data – than previously possible.
Orr Inbar, CEO and cofounder of QuantHealth
AI models are only as strong as their validation and track record. In highly regulated, risk-averse environments, such as the pharmaceutical industry, fit-for-purpose models trained and validated for specific use cases are becoming the gold standard.
Additionally, agentic AI is all about orchestration, not just individual agents. The focus should be on the overall system, from how the agents work together to who is actually responsible for validating and managing the operations (it is usually a human).
Another major takeaway from 2025 is that the value of proprietary foundation models is now undeniable. Due to recent technological advancements, the most significant barriers to building them have decreased. Whether the models are language-based, biology-based or something else entirely, the companies that don’t develop their own models will quickly become followers, not leaders in AI.
Emily Greenberg, cofounder and president of Joy Parenting Club
One of the clearest lessons from 2025 is that technology does not replace human connection. It strengthens it when it is built with intention. The most meaningful progress this year came from products that integrated empathy, personalization and trust directly into the design.
Across healthcare and well-being, people are looking for tools that help them understand themselves and take action, not tools that simply complete tasks on their behalf.
