Health tech leaders look back at 2025

It was hard to get through a conversation about healthcare in 2025 without talking about technology—namely AI. Between scribes, voice agents, and diagnostic tools, we saw a lot of new developments in the industry (as well as worries about their unchecked growth).

Tech leaders spoke with Healthcare Brew about the biggest standout moments and trends for health tech companies this past year.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Seth Cohen, president, Cedar

The mounting affordability crisis is driving a transformation in the healthcare financial experience. The current systems that treat all patients the same are built for the past. Instead, we’ve entered a new navigation era where digital health solutions don’t just streamline payments.

Provider organizations must serve as trusted guides, helping patients find their way through a complex system and capturing billions in aid that would otherwise go unclaimed.

Nele Jessel, chief medical officer, Athenahealth

2025 was the year we stopped debating whether AI belongs in healthcare and started proving that it does. Physicians and practices started embracing AI not only as an efficiency tool but as a way to bring the human touch back to care. AI helped close real-world gaps in staffing, access, and interoperability.

AI also proved pivotal in transforming fragmented health data into actionable clinical insights and operational insights…The future of care is not about replacing clinicians; it’s about giving them superpowers and removing the friction that keeps humans from doing what they do best, which is connecting, caring, and healing.

Taha Kass-Hout, global chief science and technology officer, GE HealthCare

First, we saw provider AI spend increasingly move from pilots to platforms—a trend we expect to continue in 2026. Health systems are clustering dollars into three buckets:

1. Ambient documentation and gen AI copilots that give time back to clinicians
2. Simpler billing and insurance approval processes through automation to improve cash flow
3. Operations AI to help health systems better manage patient flow, capacity, and throughput at scale

Second, we saw agentic AI take center stage in healthcare…In healthcare, for this technology to take hold, it needs to shift from a tool to a trusted teammate—a teammate that not only completes tasks but also learns, reasons, and collaborates across systems to support clinicians.

Third, we saw good momentum this year on AI reimbursement, a critical factor to accelerate the widespread adoption of AI-enabled solutions in the US at scale.