Top 2025 Healthcare Trends and Predictions

Healthcare is changing faster than ever as new technologies fundamentally reshape things like care delivery and practice management. 

For those leading healthcare organizations, this creates some pretty daunting challenges: How do you balance better patient care with rising costs? How do you keep up with changing regulations while making your systems work together seamlessly?

We sat down with our company leaders—who have deep clinical and technical expertise—to cut through the noise. Here’s what they see as some of the most important industry trends for 2025.

Key Takeaways for 2025 Healthcare Scheduling Trends and Predictions

Here are the top healthcare scheduling trends and predictions for 2025, summarized:  

• More health systems will use workforce management solutions to optimize resource allocation and utilization
• Health systems will ask for more comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities within their tools for deeper data analysis
• AI will be utilized in new ways, but true ROI will be hard to ascertain for a while
• Health systems will take a slow and controlled approach to implementing AI solutions
• Health systems will continue reducing their vendor footprint to improve the cost-effectiveness of their tech investments

Optimizing Resources: Do More with Less 

Workforce Management Solutions 

In healthcare, resource optimization involves strategically managing staff, equipment, facilities, and technology to maximize efficiency, minimize waste, and deliver high-quality patient care. 

While it has always been important, today’s operational pressures—rising costs, staffing shortages, and increasing patient demand—have made it a cornerstone of successful healthcare management. 

Ben Moore, PerfectServe’s Chief Innovation Officer, highlighted the urgency of this focus: 

“Healthcare workforce management solutions can make sure supply and demand curves are being optimized,” he said. “This is driven by the macro-economic environment of continued operational margin pressure on all healthcare systems.” 

Resource optimization now goes beyond traditional efforts to manage physician time. 

Health systems are broadening their lens to include the efficient use of all available resources, from appointments to operating rooms to medical equipment. Scheduling is emerging as the ultimate source of truth for resource management, providing actionable insights about overutilization and underutilization of personnel and physical assets.

One Lightning Bolt Scheduling customer wanted to expand its interventional radiology service line, which required increasing daily staffing by 50%—from two providers to three. By leveraging Lightning Bolt’s advanced algorithms, they adopted a gradual approach to scaling their service.  

This included: 

• Introducing half-day interventional shifts
• Progressing to full-day shifts
• Ultimately achieving five-day-per-week interventional coverage 

This measured strategy allowed the group to match staffing levels with patient needs while avoiding provider burnout. The results were impressive: greater efficiency, reduced waste, and increased revenue. 

By strategically aligning resources with patient demand, the organization not only scaled its service line but also delivered better outcomes for both patients and providers.

Enhancing Analytics 

Improving resource optimization with workforce management solutions requires one crucial thing: data. Miriam Halimi, PerfectServe’s SVP of Client Services, has seen growing demand for comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities to give health systems a more granular view of their resources. She says the industry is shifting from basic reports to more sophisticated reviews and analyses of existing data. 

“This is not new when it ties into a trend,” Miriam said. “It’s [always] solid reporting and analytics, and we’re seeing a lot of that. That’s definitely a trend in healthcare right now.”

Reduce Fatigue and Boost Provider Wellness Initiatives

Physician burnout has been an ever-present discussion since the onset of COVID, to the point that some hear the word and automatically tune out. After all, no technology can magically “solve” burnout, right? 

But rather than scrapping the idea altogether, a better approach is to use technology to protect clinician wellness by targeting specific elements of their day-to-day activities that cause toil or stress. 

The effort to mitigate alarm fatigue—and just the general onslaught of messages clinicians receive every day—is a perfect example of this revised approach. With a heavy emphasis on provider wellness initiatives, organizations are finding ways to deploy technology to more effectively decrease the number of unnecessary alerts and interruptions.

As one practical example, providers who aren’t on call shouldn’t be interrupted by patient messages in the middle of the night. Health systems are using scheduling software to ensure that messages go to the correct provider at the correct time to mitigate this issue and enhance work-life balance. 

AI Applications in Healthcare 

AI in healthcare has been trending for years, and according to Gartner®, 92% of CIOs “believe AI will be implemented in their organizations by 2025—more than any other technology.”¹ For Ben, the big-ticket item is generative AI.  

“Gen AI continues to be a big spend area and focus area for all healthcare systems,” he said. “Use cases that are being deployed include AI scribes, service and clinical virtual assistants to help guide patients, clinician efficiency tools, and systems that derive insight from operational and clinical data with the focus on improving KPI like length of stay or readmission.”  

Ben said making these use cases a reality poses a few problems, not the least of which is the as-yet-uncertain ROI for many AI solutions. Another concern is the security of the patient data that interacts with AI, but he predicts these bumps in the road will be smoothed out more as the year goes on. 

Integrating AI into healthcare spaces is a process that should be approached with the requisite amount of caution. AI is an exciting concept and has many potential use cases, but it will likely take years for the industry to have a firm grasp on the best (and safest) ways to deploy it.

More On-Site Training & Support 

The healthcare software implementation process is shifting away from COVID-era virtual workflows in favor of more on-site training and support. Miriam has seen a rise in customer requests for in-person implementation assistance, a trend she believes is caused by stretched organizational resources, especially during complex go-lives. 

Organizations are increasingly acknowledging the complexity of the technology they use every day. 

With the right training and support during implementation, they can focus on maximizing ROI and ensuring clinicians and staff can reliably make full use of the solutions available to them.

Virtualization of Care 

Successfully managing and empowering clinical teams and staff is challenging, especially with pressing physician shortages, which the AAMC projects could be up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.² 

How is the industry attempting to mitigate this growing frustration? Ben says virtual sitting could help. 

“One huge trend right now is to reduce in-hospital staffing and replace [some] on-site clinicians with virtual services,” he said. “Virtual sitting and nursing systems are being deployed at scale—we’re seeing this in our customer base. Successful care virtualization requires specific resource scheduling and real-time and accurate routing and communication, including communication into the patient room and with patients.” 

Virtual sitting poses some definite challenges, but done properly, it may provide large-scale health systems with a unique opportunity to augment their limited resources.

A Continued Push for Vendor Consolidation 

Vendor consolidation is a way to simplify your tech toolkit by choosing fewer vendors whose solutions do more. This trend has only risen in importance over time, and it has some clear benefits: 

• Reduced IT costs thanks to bundled pricing
• Reduced complexity that makes it easier for staff to use and manage technology
• Simplified implementation of new or integrated tools
• Easier vendor management by streamlining relationships with fewer partners

Miriam notes that organizations are increasingly seeking vendors with broader product functionality to avoid gaps and reduce reliance on point solutions. 

She advises mindful consolidation even when existing solutions are in place, as it can cut costs and improve functionality without adding new software.

Ben Moore agrees that consolidation of clinical and IT systems will be more prevalent in 2025. 

He noted this trend is driven by challenges with the current economic environment, a concern that was echoed in a recent report about health IT spending published by KLAS: “Payers are dealing with legacy tech stacks, many of which require significant spending and manual effort to maintain. Organizations hope to streamline their tech stacks and often favor existing vendors that offer cost-effective solutions with reliable cybersecurity.”³

“A lot of this effort [to consolidate systems] flows around the EHR, but there are equal and large opportunities to unify communication as well,” Ben said. “Organizations will be able to reduce IT cost and footprint by [transitioning from] point solutions into a set of strategic vendors.”

Sources:

1. The Top CIO Challenges, According to 12k+ of Your CIO Peers, Gartner®: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/cio-challenges
2. New AAMC Report Shows Continuing Projected Physician Shortage, Association of American Medical Colleges: https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/new-aamc-report-shows-continuing-projected-physician-shortage
3. Healthcare IT Spending 2024, KLAS: https://klasresearch.com/report/healthcare-it-spending-2024-innovation-integration-and-ai/3662