Healthcare leaders reflect on 2025

At the beginning of this year, we spoke with a few executives across the industry about what they were planning for the coming year.

We checked in with them midway through the year to see how that was going and if anything changed, and now we’re doing one last check-in to see how their 2025 went.

These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Brian Evanko, president and chief operating officer, the Cigna Group

We stepped into 2025 facing a year like no other in my 27-year career…While we have long challenged ourselves to lead and evolve and not wait for the market, we recognized there was more we could do to make healthcare better. I’m incredibly proud that early this year we introduced our Commitments to Better, a series of meaningful and relevant actions to provide better support, access, and value with transparency and full accountability. More recently, we introduced a revolutionary new pharmacy benefits model, lowering medication costs at the pharmacy counter and supporting pharmacists in communities most at risk.

Even with these changes, our healthcare system has more room for improvement. We will keep pushing the industry toward a more sustainable model because our children, friends, neighbors, and communities need us to.

Chris McKee, EVP and chief strategy officer, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

This year, we’ve made significant strides in our goals to increase the impact of our science through our three research institutes, to advance construction on state-of-the-art research and clinical facilities, and to prepare for the 2026 launch of Kinder Children’s Cancer Center. Looking ahead, we anticipate artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies will continue to shape discussions within our organization and across the healthcare landscape to understand how its thoughtful adoption can improve the patient and physician experience, enable operational excellence, and accelerate discovery.

Andrew Trister, chief medical and scientific officer, Verily

We operationalized our AI infrastructure through the launch of Pre, our precision health platform, which empowers researchers to harmonize and analyze data to personalize care. We are now putting Pre to work through our collaboration with health systems such as UCHealth and the University of Colorado Anschutz, which will employ Pre and our clinical expertise to prepare and deploy data for research and care AI use cases.

This year we launched a new consumer health app, Verily Me, which provides personalized health recommendations. These efforts align with the broader industry’s adoption of AI and growing focus on using health data to drive personalized, actionable insights.