The Future of Healthcare: 10 Trends

Lowering costs, extending access to care, and improving care quality—these are global priorities that can’t be solved by a single segment of the healthcare ecosystem.

Instead, providers need to work closely with policymakers, regulators, payers, and health IT vendors to improve the current care system while assessing the viability of new models, such as personalized medicine, value-based care, hospital at home, and telehealth. Researchers can benefit from accessing patient data to identify clinical trial candidates. Governments can play a role in reducing drug prices and regulatory burdens.

AI and data science innovations will help improve decision-making and simplify processes, but it will take a sustained effort across the ecosystem to empower patients, increase clinician productivity, and boost care quality. Read on for more on the future of healthcare.

What Is the Future of Healthcare?

The healthcare industry—including researchers, drug developers, care providers, payers, and public health officials—is poised for a profound transformation, fueled by innovative technologies and focused on a commitment to healthier communities. Breakthroughs in AI, data science, personalized medicine, and virtual care are converging to create a smart, patient-centric care system. But this transformation is about more than just tech tools. It’s aimed at creating an environment where early diagnoses, personalized treatments, and remote monitoring of patients are universal, one in which people’s longevity and well-being are enhanced.

Many challenges still must be addressed, of course—issues related mostly to high costs, fragmented systems and processes, and inequitable access to care. The industry’s management systems are hospital-centric, not patient-centric, so a typical consumer’s data might be spread across many different databases—one for each provider the patient has seen. Just as bad, for any researcher or public health official trying to study trends, patient records can sit in hundreds of databases across a country. This disconnect makes it difficult to get a timely and comprehensive view of the state of a nation’s health.

Imagine a healthcare model in which AI applied to consolidated data sets helps physicians make better treatment decisions, such as where to enroll a patient in a clinical trial or which combination of drugs to prescribe based on similar cases or based on a mapping of the individual’s genome. With advances in nanotechnology, customized molecules can be used to target and treat cancerous tumors. In life sciences, AI applied to vast amounts of population data can help researchers uncover insights and relationships they would never be able to detect manually. Remote monitoring devices, telemedicine, and virtual care products already are redefining how patients and providers interact.

These are not distant dreams. They’re within the industry’s grasp now, if not already commonplace in some quarters. The coming transformation will be powered by interoperability, with geographically dispersed systems sharing patient and other data, securely stored and accessible to the providers, patients, payers, and public health officials who need to view it (with proper permissions). It’s no secret that the industry’s modernization has been challenging. But AI, cloud computing, and other digital technologies are now mature enough to connect clinical care to research, enhance care quality, and alleviate administrative burdens.

10 Trends Determining the Future of Healthcare

Massive change is coming to the industry, both economically and in terms of patient care. Below are 10 trends that every healthcare professional should understand.

1. Digital transformation. Many industries talk about digital transformation, but its potential effects in healthcare promise to be among the most far-reaching and profound. Every part of a healthcare organization—including supply chain management, administration, HR, clinician workflows, and patient care—is implementing or exploring the latest technologies to drive efficiencies, alleviate burnout, and support enhanced patient care. Advances in low-cost videoconferencing, connectivity, and remote patient monitoring have made telehealth an option in even the most remote areas.
2. Personalized medicine. Healthcare today is still mostly a one-size-fits-all model that assumes all patients will respond similarly to the same interventions. For example, the same or similar medications are prescribed in the same dosage for most patients despite differences in metabolism, weight, or genetics. With some exceptions, health screening guidelines for cancers and other diseases tend to be based on population averages rather than personalized risk assessments.
   
   But with the cost of genome sequencing down to as little as $100, from close to $1 billion a couple of decades ago, it’s now possible for physicians to diagnose and treat patients with far more precision than ever before. Meantime, AI is helping researchers and clinicians develop and tailor therapeutic intervention options with far more granularity. For example, genomic analysis can be used to identify gene clusters associated with a specific condition, AI-based predictive analytics can help clinicians evaluate potential patient care based on historical data, and the latest clinical decision support systems can make personalized recommendations based on a complete, holistic patient record.
3. Value-based care. Much of the healthcare industry is locked into a fee-for-service model, whereby doctors and hospitals get paid based on the type and volume of services they perform with no regard to quality or outcomes. With a value-based care reimbursement model, instead of getting paid only when a patient gets sick or injured and requires a specific treatment, providers are paid a fixed amount based on the patient’s health status. This method, called capitated payment, is used to cover all the patient’s healthcare-related costs. The prepaid amount creates incentives for the provider to invest in the type of care that avoids expensive emergency room visits and hospital stays.
   
   To help ensure that care isn’t rationed, part of the doctor’s reimbursement is tied to care quality and patient care. For example, doctors can use part of the capitated payment to cover the costs of home modifications to prevent falls, to tailor meals for diabetics, or to send a nurse to a patient’s home to administer medications. To successfully implement value-based care, which requires regular tracking and reporting of performance metrics, providers will need to accurately measure costs and care quality. Without a clear understanding of the costs associated with a particular category of patient or the treatment of a particular disease, providers may enter into a contract to accept a per-patient sum that doesn’t cover the actual cost of treatment.
   
   Value-based care providers need data analytics tools, augmented by AI, that can analyze patient and population data to help identify care gaps and the potential for negative patient care. They can also use AI to help review payer contracts to benchmark their cost and utilization metrics against those of their peers.
4. Healthcare consumerism. Healthcare consumerism describes patients’ desire to gain more transparency around care costs and options. Government regulations around cost transparency require US hospitals to post clear, accessible pricing information about the services they provide, letting patients compare costs and assess value. Consumers also want their providers to make it easy for them to access their health and billing information, set up appointments, see their test results, and communicate with their care team, all via an online patient portal.
5. Workforce challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented levels of clinician burnout, contributing to an already dire shortage of physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers. In a 2024 McKinsey survey on the growing physician shortage, about 35% of respondents said they’re likely to leave their practices in the next five years, with 20% of these respondents saying they wanted to leave medicine altogether. Part of the problem is the unceasing administrative demands, requiring physicians to spend much of their time updating medical records at the expense of engaging their patients. Furthermore, physicians’ jobs have become harder as patient care has become more challenging. The population is aging, requiring greater levels of care for chronic diseases. Physicians must also find time to keep up with advances in medicine and biomedical research.
   
   The industry is scrambling for solutions, some of them technology-based. New AI agents, for example, can help automate clinical charting and documentation, freeing physicians and nurses to focus on the higher-level work they were trained to do. New EHR capabilities can comb through the latest clinical research in response to physician queries and source and summarize the information to help physicians identify the latest treatment options with relative ease.
   
   Building a positive work culture is key to attracting and retaining talented clinicians and staff. Providers need to invest in developing and enforcing regular employee training and development not only to comply with regulations, but also to create a work environment in which people get the skills to advance their careers and feel valued.
6. Health equity focus. Policymakers, regulators, and consumer advocates are starting to place a greater emphasis on health equity—reducing disparities in the availability and quality of care due to demographics. It’s not enough to expand coverage. That’s a short-term fix, and it doesn’t address the underlying issue of ballooning healthcare costs. There’s an opportunity for the industry—care providers, tech vendors, and governments—to coalesce to address the cost issue, for example, by devising creative ways to reduce or cap drug prices and stimulate provider competition. New payment models, such as value-based care (see above), can also help control costs while bolstering provider solvency. Hospitals and health systems can better control costs by tapping and connecting finance, HR, and supply chain management applications.
7. Systems interoperability. Many healthcare providers and payers still rely on fax machines and snail mail or a complicated web of poorly connected portals and third-party intermediaries. Even when their processes are fully digitized, data can remain in silos. Different providers’ EHRs don’t interoperate with one another. Payers have unique systems, processes, and forms for providers to manage patient eligibility checks, get service authorizations, and obtain payments. The result is that care can get delayed or unfairly denied, and stakeholders in the process, including payers, incur unnecessary costs. System interoperability—the ability for disparate systems to share clinical, payment, and other data—can break down information silos to help lower costs and optimize the speed and quality of patient care.
8. Preventive and holistic care. Holistic care requires a holistic view of a patient—current health status and medications; previous health events; lifestyle indicators, such as alcohol consumption or smoking; and community factors, such as access to clean water, green spaces, and care providers. Clinicians can get a holistic view of patients only with interoperable EHRs that let providers call up those patient details regardless of where care was obtained. That is, access to a longitudinal, comprehensive health record for each patient that records clinical visits, procedures, lab results, prescriptions—even genome sequencing one day—is crucial for holistic care. Almost no one receives care and tests in a single location. People visit or move to different places and use different providers, clinics, labs, and pharmacies. Currently, most of this data is siloed in disparate systems. The data doesn’t flow easily from system to system, making holistic and preventive care difficult.
   
   Interoperable systems make it relatively easy for caregivers to order medications and follow-up exams with a single click or voice command, without running the risk of ordering duplicate tests or prescribing conflicting medications. These systems can also connect to applications that track every aspect of a hospital’s inventory, so administrators instantly know the availability and location of critical equipment or life-saving medications. In addition, providers, technology vendors, and governments are starting to work together to build global early warning systems that can detect the next pathogen that threatens to turn into a pandemic, so they can be better prepared to manage the next healthcare crisis.
9. Cybersecurity investments. Survey after survey of healthcare provider CIOs and other tech leaders finds that data security is their top priority, for regulatory and other reasons. No wonder. The HIPAA Journal, which has collected healthcare data breach statistics since 2009, found in a July 2025 report a clear upward trend in the number and size of such breaches.
   
   Still, many healthcare organizations are underinvesting in cybersecurity systems and expertise, mostly for financial reasons, despite more-rigorous regulations in this area. The ramifications are severe. Successful cyberattacks can disrupt patient care, give criminals access to sensitive health and financial data, cost millions of dollars (in the case of ransomware), and even make it impossible for providers to pay their employees. The end result is higher healthcare costs for everyone.
   
   For starters, providers need to train their people on how to avoid the latest phishing scams, and they need to enforce the use of strong passwords—or better, replace them with computer-generated passcodes, which are nearly impossible to crack. The other basics of healthcare data security include implementing strong access controls and conducting regular vulnerability assessments. Providers are starting to move their EHR and other systems to cloud platforms that are updated regularly with the latest security capabilities and patches and whose data is encrypted.
10. AI and automation. Many EHRs in use today were built at a time when flip phones, iPods, and dial-up internet services were still the norm. EHRs made patient information more easily accessible, but they’ve become something of a distraction, making it difficult for physicians to give patients their full attention during examinations. It’s not surprising that EHRs are often cited as one of the main causes of physician discontent.
    
    Next-generation EHRs incorporate GenAI-based agentic voice recognition technology to record key elements of physician-patient conversations and input a draft note into the EHR, which the physician can later approve. This automation helps free up physicians to spend more face time with patients. Elsewhere, pharma companies are mining data in EHRs used by hundreds or thousands of providers and medical specialists to find qualified recruits for clinical trials. AI can speed up the process by quickly poring through medical histories and identifying relationships between specific sets of health signals. On the operational side, cloud applications embedded with AI agents can automate processes for finance, HR, and other departments, helping providers minimize administrative overhead and boost operational inefficiencies. The introduction of AI-based supply chain capabilities can enable sophisticated demand forecasting and streamlined inventory management.

What Will Healthcare Look Like in 2030?

The clinician of the future—even in the near future, five years away—will have access to tools and technologies that are in the early stages of adoption now. Robots working with miniaturized cameras will allow for surgeries that are less invasive and support quicker recovery—and eventually perform surgeries remotely. Pharma companies are beginning to test early-stage drugs they develop on lab-grown organs before moving them to clinical trials with humans. Advances in DNA sequencing support detailed analysis of an individual’s genome, allowing for more personalized treatments. In the next five years, healthcare organizations will shift from provider-centric to patient-centric systems, moving from an environment where a typical patient’s records are spread across multiple provider databases to one where clinicians can obtain a holistic view, including patient health status, treatments, and prescriptions, across the broad healthcare ecosystem.

Experience the Future of Healthcare with Oracle

Oracle is determined to play a leading role in inventing the healthcare system of the future, starting with the EHR, transforming it from an administrative burden into a clinical asset powered by AI and machine learning. Oracle Health’s next-generation EHR is a cloud native, AI-embedded solution designed to automate and improve clinical decision-making and workflows. This new EHR will incorporate generative AI agents, designed to limit EHR usage time and enable providers to spend more time with patients. It will also incorporate Oracle Health Data Intelligence, which enables users to conduct sophisticated and customized analyses, including the creation of longitudinal patient records from more than 3,000 data sources.

Future of Healthcare FAQs

What is the biggest challenge facing healthcare today?

The biggest challenge facing the healthcare industry is managing soaring costs while improving care quality.

What is the next big thing in medicine?

One of the biggest next big things in medicine is the introduction of AI-powered healthcare systems to enhance how clinical decisions are made and care is delivered, promising considerable enhancements in efficiency and accuracy.