Shortly after much of the healthcare IT world gathered in Nashville for ViVE, tens of thousands of industry players met in Las Vegas for HIMSS25. Provider organizations, payer representatives, public health officials and technology companies gathered to discuss the most prominent themes for an industry anticipating a great deal of change in 2025. Let’s take a look at some of the most compelling topics from this informative conference.
The Next AI Innovation
Artificial intelligence (AI) continued to be a pervasive topic as it has been in years past, but how the industry is discussing and using AI continues to evolve. For one, AI’s capabilities and use cases have expanded. While the first part of this decade focused on introducing AI into initial healthcare applications—such as back-office processes for managing patient data—before centering on how GenAI capabilities could support tasks like clinical documentation, HIMSS25 indicated that the second half of this decade will be all about agentic AI. Reputable companies such as Zoom, Samsung and Innovaccer were touting their agentic use cases at the conference, ranging from interfacing with patients and making clinical recommendations to billing support.
AI agents, which can go beyond collecting and summarizing information to performing tasks independently based on context from their environment, have numerous applications throughout healthcare—from payers who can use agents to support claim review, to providers who can help automate EHR workflows. With the healthcare industry still experiencing workforce challenges and issues with burnout, it’s no wonder that these stakeholders are excited about the prospect of AI agents taking low-value work off the plates of their human employees, who can then spend more time interfacing with patients, tending to more complex cases, or even being with their families after hours.
Implementation of AI to Support Patient Care
AI agents represent the next evolution in the space as the “shiny new technology” that can transform operations by acting with minimal human intervention for certain tasks, and experts predict that uptake of agents in healthcare will continue to grow. That’s an exciting proposition for many, but HIMSS25 demonstrated that AI’s next era is just as much about being responsible stewards of the technology as it is about any new capabilities.
This year’s event showed that the healthcare IT industry is moving past the phase of AI’s lifecycle that focuses only on what the technology is capable of in a vacuum. There is now a greater focus on the details of implementation that are needed to make AI and other tools truly useful. Specifically, many panel discussions focused on the infrastructure around AI that ensures its outputs are helping direct the industry’s focus back where it should be—on patient care. Are interoperability systems in place to ensure public health officials have the data they need to understand the spread of disease and act accordingly? Can that data be accessed safely without risks to patient privacy? Are new technologies, like AI-enabled clinical assessments or EHR integrations, smoothly incorporated into existing workflows to save providers time rather than burdening them? HIMSS25 showcased the tools that will strive to answer these questions and help ensure that the advancement in today’s new AI tools have the proper foundation to drive real ROI.
Measuring AI Implementation Success
Even if a new technology meets all the criteria for a smooth implementation, another consideration must be accounted for by those creating and adopting these solutions: how is success measured? The healthcare IT industry has historically struggled with demonstrating outcomes, a challenge addressed throughout HIMSS25. Measurement tools for payers and providers alike need to be built with specific programs in mind, since marks of success will rarely be consistent from one program to the next. These tailor-made measurement tools are essential for ensuring technology implementations can be evaluated appropriately so that they can adapt and evolve in a way that makes sense for the end user.
By focusing on the underlying processes and systems that make new technologies work, HIMSS25 showed that innovation in healthcare IT isn’t just about the big idea, but the small yet powerful, day-to-day innovations that are often overlooked. If you’re looking to shine a light on your company’s innovative healthcare technology solutions with marketing and communications support, get in touch: [email protected].