Three things are certain in this world: death, taxes and health care predictions for 2025. Each year we review a slew of health care outlooks and, after sifting through them, here are a few of the more interesting hypotheses.

1 | Address workforce challenges and strengthen core business technologies.

Workforce will continue to be a key focus for hospitals and health systems. More than half (58%) of health system executives expect workforce challenges, such as talent shortages, retention issues and the need for upskilling to influence their organizational strategies in 2025, according to Deloitte’s 2025 U.S. Health Care Outlook.

While workforce challenges remain a top concern, the urgency has decreased compared to two years ago when 85% of executives cited these issues during a substantial exodus of clinical staff, as noted in previous Deloitte U.S. health care outlook surveys. Despite this, many health systems still face clinical talent shortages, clinician burnout and rising labor costs. In 2025, health system leaders have an opportunity to rebuild trust and restore a sense of meaning, value and purpose in their employees’ job.

Takeaway

The report suggests health care leaders can:

• Redesign work teams. Health systems can establish comprehensive interdisciplinary care teams, provide curated training programs and map out new career paths for their staff to enhance employees’ connection to the organization and acknowledge their important roles.
• Invest in cost-saving technologies. According to the Deloitte workforce technology study, generative AI and automation technologies can cut in half the amount of time revenue cycle staff spend on mundane tasks and give bedside nurses 20% more time to spend on direct patient care. Health systems should consider leveraging these technologies and exploring new work modalities, such as virtual nursing, to enable remote work possibilities for clinical staff.
• Prioritize equity in design. All technology and operational investments and implementation projects at health systems should help ensure equitable access, experience and impact for all users — consumers, clinicians and administrative staff. Understanding the needs and impacts of different populations from a technology or operational change and intentionally designing to meet those needs or mitigate those impacts can help ensure broader adoption.

2 | Getting upstream of patient burnout is critical.

Many patients who live with chronic disease face symptoms of burnout that can lead to detrimental disengagement from their care, notes a recent essay by Tony Vahedian, CEO of CCS, a provider of clinical programs and home-delivered medical supplies for those living with diabetes or other chronic conditions.

The coming year will be a critical time for providers and payers to focus on this issue and find ways to provide care in a coordinated and personalized manner, he explained. Diabetes, for example, is a disease of overwhelming, nonstop decision-making, requiring people to stay one step ahead of countless factors each day, including diet and exercise, medications, device readings, doctors’ appointments, insurance coverage and more. Add the usual stressors of family, work and socializing, and it’s a recipe for burnout, also known as “diabetes distress,” which affects 30%-40% of people with diabetes.

Takeaway

A key step will be to bring together stakeholders this year to help providers and payers better understand how a person’s ability to engage in self-care and collaborative care can be tied to their level of physical, emotional and administrative distress in coping with the disease day to day. The challenge will be to better understand how to develop proactive, person-centered solutions that address the root causes of distress before they lead to detrimental disengagement.

3 | Here’s where AI will make a tangible impact.

Look for the dust to begin to settle around the hype and grandiose promises regarding artificial intelligence in health care and gen AI, notes a Wolters Kluwer Health forecast.

The top three growth AI areas to watch include improving workflows, enhancing clinician workforce development and patient safety, according to Stacey Caywood, Wolters Kluwer Health CEO. Caywood expects there will more synergies and partnerships to emerge between AI and complementary technologies that serve as a force multiplier for the potential of AI to drive efficiency in the clinical workflow, provide relief from burnout and deliver value for health systems.

Takeaway

Amid staffing shortages, 2025 will see AI helping future clinicians get on a fast track to practice-readiness. Nursing education tools are being wholly rethought to leverage the capabilities of AI. For example, AI has the potential to boost nurses’ licensure prep so students learn from mistakes with smarter, more personalized reinforcement. Look for AI chatbots to transform virtual reality training by providing lifelike conversations with virtual patients. AI also will accelerate the development and adoption of clinical practice changes as hospital nursing leaders turn to AI to power the often-cumbersome process of updating nursing practice protocols.

Also, look for AI to play a bigger part in patient safety this year, Caywood says. In 2025, she anticipates that solutions will dig deeper into live health data to identify disconnects in care that often are overlooked and can impact patient safety. “Imagine an AI ‘helper app’ that works 24/7 in the background to identify instances where health care providers may miss a potential test or therapy for a patient,” she says.