The Journal of AHIMA surveyed healthcare leaders to hear what they think will be some of the major issues facing health information (HI) professionals throughout 2025. Here are their responses:
Lauren Riplinger, AHIMA Chief Public Policy and Impact Officer
“From a Washington, DC, perspective, a new administration and Congress bring new opportunities and new considerations for policy related to health information. We anticipate artificial intelligence (AI) to continue to be an area of focus for policymakers in 2025. From an AHIMA perspective, patient matching remains a top priority for the organization and fundamental to advancing interoperability. For that reason, AHIMA will continue to work with our partner on Capitol Hill to advance the MATCH IT Act in Congress which seeks to improve patient matching and identification.”
Kim Perry, Chief Growth Officer at emtelligent, a developer of AI-powered deep learning that structures medical text and unlocks hidden insights
“The growing pressure to enhance quality and operational efficiency across networks continues to plague health systems, even as they grapple with a severe clinician burnout crisis. By automating complex billing, coding, and documentation tasks, medically aligned AI will help protect revenue, alleviate administrative burdens, and enable clinicians to get back to the bedside. Health systems also will use medical AI to close workflow gaps, streamline care transitions, and reduce readmissions – making it a vitally important tool for improving system-wide quality, efficiency, and revenue.”
Rom Eizenberg, CRO at Kontakt.io, which offers AI-powered real-time location systems (RTLS) solutions
“Few can imagine the scale of change that AI will bring; today’s impact assessments are falling short. Hospitals will shift from software that creates insights to placing bots throughout the organization to drive specific outcomes. Traditionally, organizations hired people to perform routine tasks, equipping them with software to streamline their work. Now they are 'hiring' autonomous software. Workforce shortages, rising costs, and the rapid advancement of AI and automation technologies drive this shift. Humans will transition from routine tasks to managing automated systems, focusing on strategy and patient care.”
Greg Miller, Vice President of Business Development at Carta Healthcare, which applies AI and clinical data abstractors to help transform healthcare
“With the practical implementation of artificial intelligence, we have witnessed a significant reduction in the time clinicians spend on manual and administrative tasks. We anticipate that over the next year, AI solutions will become increasingly prevalent, offering much-needed support to address the workforce challenges in healthcare.”
John Orosco, CEO of Red Rover Health, a healthcare integration platform that connects third-party software applications with electronic health records (EHRs)
“As healthcare becomes increasingly global, the integration needs of health systems worldwide will require scalable, flexible solutions. By 2025, companies that can offer tailored API [application programming interface] solutions to diverse markets will have a distinct advantage. The key will be creating interoperable platforms that can address region-specific requirements while offering the robustness needed for global healthcare delivery.”
Deborah Lafer Scher, Board Member at EnableComp, a specialty revenue cycle management company
“The coming year will signify a fundamental change in how healthcare organizations address industry-wide challenges. The lessons learned from the 2024 Change Healthcare cyberattack will usher in a new era of cross-industry collaboration. We will witness the rise of resilient 'coalition networks' where previously siloed organizations – such as providers, clearinghouses, payers, and technology partners – collaborate to ensure continuous care delivery and revenue flow, even during significant disruptions. Healthcare organizations that adopt this collaborative approach, fostering direct connections and innovative technologies that complement EHRs throughout the ecosystem, will be best positioned to maintain financial stability while fulfilling their mission to serve patients.”
Ryne Natzke, Chief Revenue Officer of TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company that provides financial technologies to health systems
“Medical debt is a significant problem for many Americans, and widespread lack of price transparency in healthcare is one of the primary causes. To do their part to increase price transparency, providers will adopt more digital tools that make it convenient for patients to seek care, make appointments, ask follow-up questions, and submit payment from the same platform.”
Michael Poku, MD, Chief Clinical Officer at Equality Health, a primary care platform that aims to use value-based payment models to help transform healthcare
“In shifting the US health system from fee-for-service (FFS) to value-based care (VBC), data-sharing, interoperability, AI and predictive analytics have been crucial to our progress. These capabilities and technologies enable providers to forecast individual health risks and deliver proactive, personalized care to deliver on the promise of VBC [value-based care] – better health outcomes, reduced costs, and enhanced patient experiences. In 2025, predictive analytics will give way to prescriptive analytics with its more actionable, evidence-based recommendations for providers and care teams to deploy in near real-time. This evolution toward prescriptive analytics will sustainably scale VBC, unseat FFS, and enable new, innovative care models that deliver tailored whole-patient care and allow us to finally break free of FFS.”
Lyle Berkowitz, MD, CEO of KeyCare, an Epic-based virtual care company
“To overcome the limitations of the isolated 1.0 era of telehealth, it will become increasingly essential that health systems are capable of fully sharing patient records with outside telehealth providers. When telehealth partners use the same electronic health records as health systems, virtual providers can seamlessly obtain full patient histories, driving better patient care and patient satisfaction.”
Nikhil Bhatia, vice president of Solutions Management for Paragon for Altera Digital Health, a global health IT company
“If every patient’s data was accessible regardless of the facilities they visit or the EHRs those facilities use, you could likely predict the effectiveness of different care plans with AI. However, AI is only as good as the data it gets, and that data currently sits in multiple silos. Bringing that data together is necessary to push AI to its full potential, but that aggregated data also becomes a cybersecurity risk, so having a highly secure environment is key. In 2025, the cloud will be the answer to these conflicting challenges. The amount of computation this kind of AI requires is only possible on a highly scalable cloud. If providers have not migrated their workloads to a cloud provider yet, they must make moves to do so, or they risk losing out on the immense opportunities AI will unlock in 2025 and beyond.”
Jay Ander, MD, chief medical officer of Medicomp Systems, a physician-driven provider of patient data solutions
“Clinical documentation will undergo a fundamental transformation in 2025 as healthcare organizations confront the limitations of AI models trained primarily on synthetic data. We'll see the emergence of 'documentation trust networks' where healthcare organizations share validated clinical algorithms and documented outcomes, creating a foundation for reliable information exchange. Organizations will implement point-of-care validation tools that ensure accurate, standardized clinical documentation while maintaining human oversight of AI-generated content.”
George Pappas, CEO of Intraprise Health, a compliance and cybersecurity company
“Smaller healthcare organizations in 2025 will increasingly turn to hiring fractional chief information security officers (CISO). Hospitals and healthcare systems need a senior leader to manage their overall security posture and program; however, many smaller organizations can’t afford to add a new full-time position. The solution? Share a CISO with another employer(s). We’ll also see systems try to define where CISOs fit in the corporate structure. Should they report to the CEO? Legal? CIO? Finance? CISO responsibilities spread across the entire system and will arrive at different models based on their size and complexity.”
Meri Beckwith, co-founder of Lindus Health, a company that runs clinical trials
“In 2025, generative AI will continue to transform the landscape of clinical trial documentation, serving as a vital collaborator in research workflows. AI will streamline the drafting process by integrating real-time clinical data and ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements. Researchers will then refine these drafts, leveraging their expertise to address the nuances of complex trials. This partnership will accelerate timelines while enhancing the quality and accuracy of trial documentation, ultimately advancing the pace of medical research.”
Damon Adams is content production editor for AHIMA.