Top Trends and Insights: HIMSS25 Recap for Healthcare Design Leaders

Walking into one of the largest healthcare conferences in the world was overwhelming, to say the least. The sheer scale of HIMSS25, with its maze of exhibition halls, back-to-back sessions, and over 30,000 attendees, mirrored the complex, sprawling nature of healthcare itself. During my time there, I spoke with entrepreneurs, CEOs of global healthcare organizations, and students balancing health informatics studies with clinical work. What struck me most was the disconnect between the conference's overwhelmingly optimistic, tech-approving tone and the skepticism and anxiety I regularly encounter in practice.

In this article, I'll share what I learned about healthcare's present challenges, its potential future, and how design leaders can prepare their teams to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape, with a healthy dose of reality mixed in with the optimism.

Outline:

1. The Current State of Healthcare - Challenges and Innovations

2. Healthcare in 2050 - A Glimpse into the Future

3. Preparing Your Design Team for Healthcare's Future

4. Acknowledgements

The Current State of Healthcare - Challenges and Innovations

One thing became abundantly clear at HIMSS 25: everyone is struggling with AI implementation. Despite the polished presentations and confident predictions, hallway conversations revealed widespread uncertainty about how to effectively integrate AI into clinical workflows. The gap between vendor promises and on-the-ground reality remains substantial.

The Labor Crisis

Healthcare today is experiencing a clinician labor shortage that has reached critical mass. This shortage affects every aspect of care delivery, from front-line nurses to specialized physicians, creating bottlenecks in patient care and increasing burnout among existing staff. The economic implications are equally concerning, healthcare now represents the single largest item in the US federal budget, with an astonishing 73% of all healthcare spending directed toward labor costs.

Technology Implementation Challenges

Epic continues their international expansion, though this growth hasn't been without substantial criticism. Many healthcare professionals point to issues with interoperability, user experience, and the significant time burden these systems often place on clinicians. I'm skeptical that these challenges will be resolved quickly, as they're deeply embedded in how these systems were designed and deployed.

Promising Digital Health Pilots

Virtual monitoring technologies are beginning to show promising results, particularly in remote and underserved areas. In California, we're seeing encouraging outcomes from the largest rollout of Ambient AI technology to date. 

However, I remain cautious about these case studies, they often highlight successes while downplaying difficulties. Many organizations struggle to connect their technological interventions with measurable clinical outcomes, making it difficult to assess true impact.

Evolving Regulatory Landscape

The Healthy Technology Act is creating pathways for AI-assisted prescriptions in the United States, while Europe has implemented its own comprehensive AI Act that will unify complex regulations. 

There's a growing preference among healthcare professionals for the term "augmented intelligence" rather than "artificial intelligence", a linguistic shift that seems designed to make the technology less threatening to skeptical providers.

Persistent Adoption Barriers

Despite these advances, provider skepticism toward AI remains widespread and, in my view, largely justified. Many clinicians express concerns about accuracy, liability, and the potential erosion of the human elements of care. Rural communities continue to present unique challenges for hospital systems, and billing processes continue to be complex and problematic.

Education Evolution

The education sector is responding with the rise of health informatics programs that create hybrid clinician/technologist credentials. Hospital systems are beginning to implement AI training for clinicians, including skills like prompt engineering that help providers interact effectively with AI systems.

Healthcare in 2050 - A Glimpse into the Future

The conference was filled with bold predictions about healthcare's future, and while I found many compelling, some seemed overly optimistic about our rate of progress. The timeline to 2050 gives us room to achieve these advances, but the path there won't be as straight or smooth as many presenters suggested.

Medical Breakthroughs

By 2050, we'll likely see remarkable progress in treating conditions that have long challenged medicine. Cancer and AIDS treatments will have advanced tremendously, potentially approaching functional cures for many variants. As these conditions become more manageable, research focus will likely shift toward gut and brain issues, complex areas where we're only beginning to understand the interplay between physical health, mental wellbeing, and the microbiome.

Revolutionary Treatment Technologies

The organ transplant landscape will be revolutionized by lab-grown 3D printed organs, eliminating lengthy donor waitlists. Gene editing will become a common approach to disease elimination, with conditions once considered lifelong now treatable at the genetic level. However, access to these technologies will likely remain uneven, with economic and geographic disparities determining who benefits first.

Advanced Diagnostics

Digital twins, virtual replicas of patients' physiological systems, will revolutionize healthcare assessment, allowing providers to test treatments virtually before administering them to actual patients. Diagnosis capabilities will advance to single-cell precision, enabling the detection of diseases at their earliest stages.

Surgical Innovation

Surgical procedures will be transformed by technologies like Cyberknife and other computer-assisted approaches, improving precision and reducing recovery times.

Healthcare Decentralization

The physical infrastructure of healthcare will undergo dramatic changes. Hospitals as we know them will become increasingly decentralized, with facility-based care decreasing significantly as care moves into homes and communities. Traditional hospitals will primarily serve emergency, acute care, and surgical needs, while routine care shifts to outpatient settings and virtual platforms.

Hospital-at-Home Revolution

The Hospital-at-Home model, supported by AI-enhanced virtual monitoring, will expand dramatically, allowing patients to receive hospital-level care in the comfort of their own homes. Healthcare organizations are already preparing for future pandemics, incorporating lessons from COVID-19 into their infrastructure and protocols.

Employer-Based Care

Employers will take a more active role in employee healthcare, potentially becoming significant hubs for preventative care and wellness programs.

Provider Role Evolution

Traditional primary care physicians may be largely replaced by nurse practitioners and other advanced practice clinicians, reserving physician expertise for complex cases. Specialty care will shift predominantly to telehealth, improving access to experts regardless of geographic location.

Home-Based Testing

Home test kits will become the norm for routine diagnostics, reducing the need for laboratory visits and accelerating diagnosis timelines. Even the emotional aspects of care will be transformed, with emotion analytics playing an increasing role in mental health and patient experience assessment.

Policy Transformation

"Wellness Insurance" models will emerge as preventative care takes center stage, incentivizing healthy behaviors rather than simply responding to illness. Population health monitoring laws will expand, and international practice laws will enable truly global healthcare access.

Lifestyle as Medicine

The social determinants of health will receive increased attention, with food and sports increasingly prescribed as medicine. Wearable health technology will be introduced at younger ages as part of comprehensive population health monitoring.

The Future of Documentation

My boldest prediction is that ambient scribes will evolve into fully ambient EMRs, where all digital documentation is automated with AI (Imagine never having to physically enter information into a computer system!). Perhaps they would be equipped with voice-activated information retrieval, creating seamless clinical workflows that drastically reduce administrative burden. This would help bring joy to the practice of medicine as clinicians start looking away from their screens and turn their attention to their= patients.

Preparing Your Design Team for Healthcare's Future

One of the most significant challenges I observed, both at the conference and in my conversations with peers, is managing design team anxiety amid rapid technological change. Many industry professsionals worry about their relevance in an AI-powered future, while simultaneously feeling overwhelmed by the need to master new tools and approaches.

As design leaders in healthcare, we must not only equip our teams with new skills but also help them navigate the emotional landscape of industry transformation. This requires honesty about what we know and don't know, and an acknowledgment that perfect certainty is neither possible nor necessary.

Embrace AI Product Design

Ensure your designers are prepared for an AI-driven future:

• Build AI literacy fundamentals:Focus on understanding AI capabilities and limitations rather than technical implementation details

• Develop voice UI design skills:Train designers in conversational interfaces as voice becomes increasingly central to healthcare interactions

• Explore ethical AI frameworks: Research principles for responsible AI use that prioritize patient trust and provider confidence

Gain Real-World Clinical Experience

One of the most valuable insights I gained from a post-panel Q&A was the importance of clinical exposure for designers:

• Encourage clinical shadowing: Have designers volunteer in hospitals or take scribe  training in clinical settings to observe healthcare delivery firsthand

• Establish hospital partnerships: Create formal shadowing programs with local hospitals across different departments

Stay Informed Through Research

• Analyze case studies critically: Review implementations with healthy skepticism, looking for details about challenges, not just success stories

• Create knowledge-sharing rituals: Schedule regular research reviews focused on emerging healthtech

• Follow key healthcare innovators: Identify and follow thought leaders who provide balanced perspectives on healthcare innovation

Build Multidisciplinary Skills

Help your team develop cross-functional knowledge:

• Healthcare economics basics: Ensure designers understand payment models and financial incentives that affect healthcare workflows

• Regulatory frameworks: Familiarize the team with HIPAA, the AI Act, and other relevant and emerging regulations

• Clinical terminology: Develop a working knowledge of medical terms relevant to your focus areas

Leverage AI Tools in the Design Process

• AI-enhanced prototyping tools: Identify and adopt tools that accelerate the design process

• Research analysis assistance: Use AI to help identify patterns in user research data

• Documentation automation: Implement tools that reduce administrative burden for your team

Managing Team Anxiety

Walking the exhibition floor at HIMSS, I was struck by the seemingly hundreds of healthcare startups fighting for attention, each attempting to solve nuanced problems and integrate with established systems. This fragmentation creates anxiety for technology teams who fear they can't possibly stay current with every innovation.

As leaders, we need to create psychological safety that allows designers to admit what they don't know and prioritize learning in areas most relevant to your organization's strategy. Regular check-ins about not just project progress but also emotional well-being can help identify and address burnout before it becomes debilitating.

Here are approaches I plan to implement with my own team:

• Establish learning priorities: Focus on depth in a few key areas rather than breadth across all healthtech

• Create psychological safety: Normalize saying "I don't know" and reward learning, not just knowing

• Schedule emotional check-ins: Make space for discussing fears and uncertainties about industry changes

• Celebrate human-centered perspective: Emphasize that human designers bring critical empathy and contextual understanding that AI cannot replace

• Model curiosity over expertise: Demonstrate that leaders are also learning and adapting

  
  

The healthcare design leaders who thrive in the coming decades will be those who can combine deep clinical understanding with technological fluency and human-centered design principles. We may not have everything figured out, and that's okay. Leaders never do. What matters is creating environments where teams can learn, adapt, and apply their uniquely human perspectives to shaping technology that truly serves patients and providers.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to express my gratitude to the expert panelists from the "Harnessing Disruptive Tech: Your Keys to Driving Digital Health Transformation" session:

• Dr. Tamara Sunbul, Digital Health Transformation and Innovation Strategic Advisor

• Dr. David Rhew, Global Chief Medical Officer and VP Healthcare Strategy at Microsoft Corporation

• Reenita Das, Healthcare and Life Science Partner and Senior Vice President at Frost & Sullivan

• Dr. James Mault, CEO and Founder of BioIntelliSense

Their insights have been instrumental in shaping my understanding of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for healthcare design professionals.

What was your experience at HIMSS 25? I'd love to hear your thoughts and insights in the comments below!