2025 Healthcare Policy Predictions Recap

No doubt 2025 will be a wild year for healthcare.

But what can we expect from AI, GLP-1s, and a second Trump administration?

In this episode of HealthBiz Briefs, host David Williams dives into his predictions for 2025, looking at the coming changes to the biggest stories in healthcare.

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HealthBiz Briefs is a short-form CareTalk podcast that features brief, focused one-on-one conversations with healthcare business leaders. Host David E. Williams—president of the healthcare strategy consulting boutique Health Business Group —is also a board member, investor in private healthcare companies, and author of the Health Business Blog. These quick episodes deliver bite-sized insights into the trends, innovations, and challenges shaping the industry.

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Transcript

David: 0:00

No doubt 2025 will be a wild year for healthcare. But what specifically can we expect from AI, GLP 1s, and the second Trump administration? Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, President of Health Business Group, here with the latest Health Biz Brief, my six healthcare predictions for 2025. Make sure to subscribe so you won't miss an episode. Here we go. Number one, the GLP 1 revolution will spawn a thriving ecosystem of adherence, wellness, and cost savings solutions. Now, GLP 1 drugs seemingly came out of nowhere, and now sales are headed to over 100 billion a year or more. And these drugs are helping people take off significant weight. But keeping that weight off is still going to require diet, exercise, and behavior modification. And you can be sure, That insurers, employers and individuals who are paying so much for medication are going to want to make sure their investment pays off. Supporting this ecosystem is going to be the second coming for digital health companies that soared during the pandemic due to telehealth before crashing to earth. It's also a great chance to prove out new AI supported adherence approaches and for places like gyms and athletic trainers to play a more direct role in healthcare. As individuals strive to retain and build muscle as they lose fat. But weight loss is just the beginning because new indications like sleep apnea, cardiovascular disease, and many more are being added. So this ecosystem most likely to keep growing in 2025 and way beyond. Prediction number two, AI finally delivers in diagnosis, monitoring, and administrative efficiency. AI has operated behind the scenes in healthcare literally for decades, but the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 opened the floodgates for generative AI in particular. It's taken a couple of years, but people are finally getting comfortable with what AI can do in medicine, and they're starting to harness it. I see really big opportunities in creating empathetic, culturally attuned, personalized health messaging, but even more significantly, AI is going to revolutionize diagnosis by analyzing vast data sets, integrating clinical data, the genome, the microbiome, and social determinants of health, and also prompting diagnosticians to provide additional data to narrow a differential diagnosis. And finally, an arms race between payers and providers will feature AI bots battling it out on prior authorization and other contentious issues. Frankly, if your physician isn't using A. I. to help with diagnosis, I would be concerned. Prediction number three. Make America healthy again spurs some advances, but overall it harms public health. The focus on chronic disease prevention and healthy food makes a whole lot of sense. But good luck to RFK Jr. in getting the rest of the Republican Party to turn against factory farming and junk food. Meanwhile, dissing childhood vaccinations and promoting raw milk are likely to do real damage. And those harms might not even take long to materialize. I'm keeping my eyes open for measles outbreaks in 2025, and I'm definitely worried about bird flu making the jump to humans through unpasteurized dairy products. Prediction number four. Health executives go on defense due to public backlash and the fear of violence. Violence in healthcare settings is shockingly common, and it's really not news to frontline workers like nurses who witness violence routinely. I've even featured healthcare security companies like canopy. on my podcast. We're dealing with this very issue. What surprised me about the murder of Brian Thompson is not that it happened or even that it brought out so much backlash against health insurers. Rather, I was surprised that Brian didn't deploy any security measures, such as traveling with armed guards or wearing a concealable bulletproof vest. Either one would probably have saved him. 2025 is the year that healthcare execs are going to wake up to this problem. They're not necessarily going to do it by changing their business models, but rather by protecting themselves physically the way high profile people at high risk are accustomed to doing. Sad, but true. Prediction number five, primary care and value based models surge fueled by plan and employer investment. Everyone talks about the importance of primary care and how there should be more of it, but the trends are quite discouraging. Transcribed Just an example on an anecdotal basis, my own internist went into concierge practice, and my wife's took early retirement. The traditional reimbursement model still funnel funds to hospitals and specialists, and not primary care. But something has to give, and in this case, I see health plans and employers putting their money where their mouth is. Some of them are hiring primary care providers directly, others are changing the reimbursement model to give primary care more control over the total health care dollar. There's also a direct primary care model emerging, one that doesn't rely so much on insurance, but where the patient is treated as the real customer. Physicians seem happier and it's more customer service oriented for patients as well. Prediction number six, healthcare mergers and acquisitions make a comeback with strategic buyers leading the way. There's been a dearth of mergers and acquisitions in healthcare for the last couple of years. It's affected our own consulting business where there's been less opportunity to provide due diligence to private equity firms and strategic buyers. I'm hoping and expecting to see a more active market in 2025. Lower interest rates will help a bit, but the main reason is that strategic buyers are likely to face less antitrust scrutiny from Washington DC under the new administration. They're going to resume gobbling up provider organizations, technology providers, and service companies, which in turn will spur new venture formation and private equity activity. Well, that's it for another episode of Health is Briefs. I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group. May you have a happy, healthy, prosperous, and safe new year. And let me know what you think about my six healthcare predictions for 2025.