3 critical strategic themes for 2025
2025 is off to a wild start in everything, everywhere, all at once. Fires are burning in Los Angeles, the federal government is poised for radical change, and the course of wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine remain uncertain. In healthcare, all these drivers of instability are complicated by rising costs, in part due to medical advances like the GLP-1 drugs (e.g., Ozempic), but also shortages in the people needed to deliver state-of-the-art medicine.
The stresses on healthcare leaders and the people at the front lines of care are real. We will, of course, collectively get to the other side of the crises upon us. History teaches us that people under duress find a way to muddle through. But the pack has been separating in how organizations fare throughout this decade—for example, in the first years of the pandemic, employee “engagement” rose in the top 10 percentile of organizations but dramatically declined in the bottom 10 percentile.
A year from now, when we look back at 2025, what will be the themes that distinguish which organizations got stronger and which got weaker? I’m very aware of Yogi Berra’s observation that “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But based on Press Ganey Human Experience data relevant to healthcare, and our “ears to the ground” at organizations throughout the country, we’ve determined three strategic focuses likely to influence whether organizations thrive or struggle in 2025.
1. AI will be a competitive differentiator as a driver of efficiency and innovation
Some skeptics ask whether AI is overhyped and the fuss will soon die down. The opposite is true. AI is taking the world by storm. One of the most thrilling things for me this week was starting my personal process of adopting ambient AI for medical note generation. All available information shows that it will make my life as a doctor easier and more enjoyable, and my patients are going to appreciate the added time when I am looking and talking to them. By this time next year, many physicians and I will have forgotten how miserable the old way of writing office notes was.
This is just one area of medicine in which AI will be a force, easing the burdens on the healthcare workforce, making care safer, and improving patient experiences and outcomes. By the end of 2025, caregivers at organizations that quickly adopted AI simply won’t want to work at those slower to embrace it.
2. Physician well-being will be dominant issue
The pressures to recruit and retain all types of caregivers—especially nurses—will be unrelenting, but 2025 will be a year in which physician well-being emerges as a true crisis issue. The wave of unionization across the country is a sign of discontent coming to a boil. The discontent is particularly strong among primary care physicians, and increasing numbers of them are leaving their current organizations for concierge practices.
Where should physicians “dock” in the healthcare system, and how should they be paid? It’s fair to say that few, if any, organizations believe they’ve figured everything out. There is unhappiness among physicians employed by hospitals, by health insurers, and by private equity groups.
This is likely to be a year in which real efforts are made to identify and address drivers of physician discontent in every model. It is also likely to be a year in which new models of primary care, in which the front-line caregiver is not a physician, are used on a wider scale for an irresistible reason: There simply are not primary care physicians available.
3. Organizations will prioritize culture, with focuses on high reliability, safety, and respect
One very thoughtful CEO said to me this week, “During the pandemic, we had to pick which battles we were going to fight, and some things got put on the back burner. I would say that we didn’t worry about our culture as much as we might have, and we have to do that now.”
He’s right—and not the only CEO reaching that conclusion. Data overwhelmingly demonstrate that all types of performance are tightly correlated with workforce engagement. That’s why I wrote my new book Social Capital in Healthcare: to make the argument that every manager should act like the CFO of social capital for their part of the organization.
A gold-standard goal for building social capital is becoming a high reliability organization (HRO). That phrase rolls off one’s tongue, but getting there takes work—not decades, but years. And for many organizations, 2025 is going to be the first year of taking on that work in earnest. The ROI from becoming an HRO goes far beyond safety alone. Our data demonstrate that high reliability leads to better performance across the board—e.g., workforce retention, patient experience, and overall market perception.
This week, a chief human resources officer shared an insightful comment with me on the work of strengthening our cultures, despite working in a state where political leaders discourage anything with the phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This CHRO noted that political realities are political realities, but her organization cannot turn away from the values that mean so much to their employees and their overall mission to provide equitable care.
She said, “The ‘r’ word we need to focus on is respect.” That theme—that every patient and every employee should be treated with respect—is likely to become more and more widely embraced in 2025. All of Press Ganey’s data indicate that progress in that direction is a critical step tied to high reliability and the well-being of everyone in healthcare, including physicians.
So my final overarching and optimistic prediction for 2025 is that we will make important progress developing our cultures. By this time next year, we should be more confident that we are heading in the right direction, and the positive momentum will serve as a springboard for future success.