HLTH 2025: Reading Between the Lines of a Shifting Healthcare Landscape

It’s always interesting to hear how everyone experiences the HLTH conference…the energy, the excitement, the new products and familiar faces. This year was no different. The days were filled with learning about new innovations, seeing how entrepreneurs have evolved, and considering new trends. But what stood out most to me wasn’t just what was present, it was what was absent. And that absence says a lot about the future of healthcare.

A recurring observation was that there were fewer payers in attendance and that the overall tone felt more subdued. Meanwhile, AI was everywhere, woven into nearly every conversation, presentation, and product. I also noticed the growing overlap among solutions, many sounding similar, offering “distinctions without differences.” Amidst the noise, there were also fascinating products that have the potential to meaningfully reshape the healthcare paradigm.

My broader takeaway from HLTH was that we’re witnessing a systemic shift across the healthcare ecosystem. The tone, attendance, and conversations all reveal where the market is moving and more importantly, what’s driving that movement.

AI Is Not Innovation; It’s Acceleration

I’ve written and spoken about this before: AI is not, in itself, innovative. It has existed for decades, and OpenAI has been around since 2015, and ChatGPT has been publicly accessible since 2022. Much continues to evolve in the AI market for sure, but we continue to layer AI onto every process, product, and platform forgetting to ask why, or what the problem is that we really need to solve.

The most interesting conversations at HLTH weren’t about who had the most advanced AI; they were about those who are embedding AI into infrastructure to improve efficiency so that they can focus on solving bigger problems. These are the companies that understand healthcare is fundamentally human-centered, and that technology’s greatest potential lies in enabling more equitable, affordable, and accessible human interactions.

This is the new healthcare paradigm: healthcare owned and accessed by people, integrating daily and episodic data across the life course.

System Adaptation (Not Absorption) of Innovation

The quieter presence of payers should be interpreted in a broader context: the ongoing government shutdown, pressures on Medicaid, and overall economic uncertainty heading into the year’s end. But it’s also worth asking whether payers are stepping back because patient-focused innovations are stepping forward.

History shows that when large systems absorb innovation into their existing structures, the transformative power of those tools often diminishes. When innovation must conform to legacy frameworks, its ability to reimagine the system is diluted or lost.

HLTH left me with a recurring question: Can our healthcare system adopt innovation without neutralizing it?

Surveys predict that 2026 healthcare costs will continue to rise driven by chronic conditions, increased utilization, and escalating drug prices. There are numerous articles following HLTH and other major conferences suggesting that the healthcare system must modernize, automate, predict, and personalize to remain relevant. But purchasing more technology without structural change risks adding to the cost problem, without solving the fundamental challenges for patients and providers.

The Rise of the Connected Healthcare Paradigm

Which highlights some of the excitement at HLTH. Many of the showcased tools are actively pushing healthcare into the future: facial scanning for blood pressure, self-administered medication devices, voice-based cognitive tracking for dementia, and patient-performed physical exams.

These innovations represent elements of the emerging user-owned, connected healthcare ecosystem. Many are designed to reduce provider workload and capacity strain by enabling patients to collect and manage their own continuous health data. Products and services are also addressing how to make provider time more accessible, and valued, by removing some of the administrative burdens and system-based processes. The best solutions are those that integrate, not silo data; that view providers as partners to individuals, not systems; and that use AI as an accelerator, not a substitute for innovation.

Looking Ahead: The Courage to Build Differently

HLTH 2025 made it clear that presence and absence weren’t the story, transformation was. The conference spotlighted organizations embracing the new healthcare paradigm which is redefining where care happens, who delivers it, and how its value is measured, all evolving in real time.

The conversations at HLTH reflect this transformation in motion. The real question for the year ahead is simple: Who is building for what comes next?