The healthcare sector remains a complex landscape shaped by continuing labor shortages, inflation and a disruptive supply chain. At the same time, providers, suppliers and payers are working to implement massive changes in an increasingly competitive and value-based market under a new Congress and administration.

As healthcare organizations navigate this evolving environment, here are six emerging trends that can shape healthcare in 2025 – and some advice on how to prepare.

Nursing the Numbers: Solutions for the Healthcare Workforce Shortage

Healthcare staffing shortfalls will continue to pose challenges in 2025. One study projects a shortage of about 100,000 critical healthcare workers by 2028, straining a system already fraught with highly manual, inefficient processes.

To retain valued employees, Premier data shows providers have been opening coffers, boosting pay for qualified nursing staff by nearly 17 percent nationwide. In 2024 versus 2019, overtime hours drove $90 more expense per discharge, and agency use drove an increase of $325 per discharge. These increases, often un-recouped by providers, are impacting already thin margins. Meanwhile, physician burnout rates remain elevated from pre-pandemic levels.

Tackling the healthcare workforce shortage starts with eliminating tasks that could be delegated to non-clinical staff and tech-enabling processes that are eating into caregivers’ time. These measures not only make care more efficient, but they also help ensure accurate coding and reimbursement. For example, automating claims transactions and prior authorizations could alleviate labor shortages while saving billions of dollars annually across the U.S. healthcare system. Finally, clean data and benchmarking can help pinpoint areas for improvement, while predictive analytics can alert providers to low staffing levels in advance to enable proactive hiring and training.

Proof point: Automating provider and health plan interactions by moving to fully electronic transactions could save $18.3 billion per year.

The Margin Mirage: Turning Illusions into Income

Many providers are beginning the year in dire financial straits. Rising costs are eroding margins, while reimbursement contracts and federal policies are limiting providers’ ability to recoup added expenses. Though a median operating margin of 4.2 percent through the first half of 2024 (compared to 1.3 percent in July 2023 and –0.98 percent in July 2022) suggests the beginning of a slow recovery, providers must look beyond low-hanging fruit for financial sustainability and success.

Take purchasing and procurement processes, for example. Forward-thinking providers are partnering with clinical staff to standardize purchasing among preferred suppliers and unlock deeper volume-based discounts, often through committed buying programs. These programs’ best-in-class pricing have been shown to reduce supply expenses by almost 25 percent.

In 2025, systems can combat shrinking margins with committed buying and the technologies that enable it. For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions funnel buying to approved, contracted suppliers, allowing exceptions only via a carefully documented process. This hardwires the buying commitment into the workflow.

Digitizing the procure to pay process offers another significant savings opportunity, yet the healthcare industry lags far behind others in adopting automated systems. Manual, paper-based workflows can lead to error-prone processes that waste time and add unnecessary costs and delays, which not only impact an organization’s finances, but also the delivery of affordable patient care.

With added expenditures and lost revenues putting so many health systems in a difficult position, the bottom line is still the name of the game.

Proof point: Technology solutions have helped providers identify $1.5 billion in savings opportunities, generating an average return on investment (ROI) of 16:1.

Care for All: Enhancing Patient Access and Outcomes

Solutions to this growing problem are not a nice-to-have – they’re a public health imperative. And advanced data and technology platforms, coupled with third-party advisory support, can help providers across the care continuum co-design, implement and optimize a cohesive patient access and retention strategy.

Healthcare organizations can start by assessing performance against direct competitors, identifying gaps, inefficiencies and opportunities in real time. But solutions that enable more personalized care are also imperative: Analytics, clinical benchmarking and clinician performance management can help providers maximize efficiency and quality outcomes. Clinical decision support (CDS) can also deliver tailored, evidence-based recommendations at the point of care.

Advanced technologies offer enormous potential to enhance patient access and outcomes. Advisory experts work to help providers harness this potential, identifying roadblocks and recommending the technology, tools and data best able to meet the organization’s patient access, operational and quality goals.

Just as patients’ health depends on access to the right care at the right time, providers’ clinical and financial performance will depend on how well they adapt in an era marked by heightened expectations regarding access.

Proof point: Data revealed opportunities to streamline processes, reduce waste and improve the overall efficiency of care delivery – improving one organization’s bottom line and making a direct, positive impact on patient care.

Machine Yearning: AI for Better, Smarter, Faster Care

If 2024 was the year of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in healthcare, 2025 will be the year of more widespread implementation. Ninety-four percent of global business leaders report that AI is critical to their organization’s success over the next few years, and 79 percent report full-scale deployment for three or more types of AI applications. Market forces make tech-enablement impossible to ignore, as potential savings are essential to remain competitive and ensure success.

While increased efficiency may be the most talked-about potential benefit, in the healthcare industry, AI technologies are also critical tools for quality improvement. For example, one study showed that sepsis care made dramatic improvements (almost two hours faster to antibiotic treatment) when enabled with an AI-powered CDS.

AI adoption by life sciences companies will also continue to grow, automating candidate selection for clinical trials and generating real-world evidence (RWE) – which is becoming more critical to secure regulatory approvals for drugs, devices and other treatment interventions. By quickly finding the needle-in-the-haystack insights often hidden within massive data sets, AI-enabled data can help speed the regulatory approval process (averaging 12 years for drugs and seven years for devices) and create the evidence base for providers to evaluate cost and quality effectiveness as part of value-based contracting.

AI in healthcare is expected to become a $67.4 billion market by 2027. It’s here to stay, and healthcare organizations must remain committed to building foundational capabilities to achieve speed to value.

Proof point: Widespread AI implementation in the next five years could result in a savings of five to 10 percent of all healthcare spending, or $200 to $360 billion annually.

Procure with Precision: Enhancing Supply Chain Resiliency

Manufacturing and labor disruptions, extreme weather and other global events continued to stress the healthcare supply chain in 2024. From product shortages and inflationary pressures to trade policy uncertainties, persistent and emerging forces alike are bringing the global supply chain landscape to a boiling point.

In this environment, it’s no surprise that supply chain optimization is a top priority for providers and suppliers. Ongoing disruptions and product shortages continue to hamstring industry stakeholders and threaten patient care. Consider, for example, recent IV fluid shortages that impacted more than 86 percent of U.S. providers in the aftermath of October 2024 hurricanes.

In 2025, supply chains must become more resilient. This will require widespread adoption of two strategies: 1) diversifying supply sources and eliminating just-in-time ordering and 2) digitizing and automating operations to create more real-time visibility. Meanwhile, the federal government must work more collaboratively with industry stakeholders. From incentivizing domestic manufacturing of critical medical supplies, to allowing the establishment of trusted trade partnerships, these measures will help grow the resiliency and diversity of our nation’s medical supply chains.

Building a resilient supply chain is not just a factor in organizations’ financial health, but also a matter of patient safety and care quality.

Proof point: One health system used AI-driven predictive models to proactively address hundreds of potential shortages before patient care was impacted.

Mile Markers: Leading the Race to Value

Patients are becoming more empowered and informed healthcare consumers. They are increasingly voting with their feet based on factors such as access, affordability, safety and quality of care. Accordingly, 90 percent of provider executives say healthcare consumerism is a top priority for their organization.

Patients now have robust quality and cost information at their fingertips. Still, many fail to act on the data because measures are often confusing and do not reveal meaningful differences between various options.

In 2025, providers must lean into leading, qualitative rankings programs to prove their value to patients, payers and local communities. This, in turn, allows providers to leverage their benchmarks and information as a north star for competitive analyses and performance improvement. Balanced scorecards inclusive of clinical, financial and operational metrics enable ongoing quality enhancements, marketing of services, talent recruitment and management activities, and more.

Meanwhile, providers must also integrate benchmarks and real-time data from sources such as electronic health record (EHR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems – which together, create a unified view of performance and financial, operational and clinical outcomes.

To win the race to value, providers must focus on what matters – and measure it.

Proof point: Consumer-centric healthcare organizations are driving more than twice the revenue growth versus competitors with lower patient satisfaction scores.

2025 is the confluence of incredible opportunities and systemic challenges that, if not addressed, can prevent healthcare organizations from achieving strong outcomes while protecting and improving their bottom line. Although it’s impossible to know how all these trends may come to fruition, acting on them now can spark improvements leading to better, smarter and faster healthcare for providers and suppliers – and the patients and communities they serve.

For more information, get your complimentary copy of the complete guide to trends that could have a significant impact on healthcare in 2025.