As we wrap up another year and get ready for 2025 to begin, it is once again time for everyone’s favorite annual tradition of Health IT Predictions! We reached out to our incredible Healthcare IT Today Community to get their insights on what will happen in the coming year and boy did they deliver. We in fact got so many responses to our prompt this year, that we have had to narrow them down to just the best and most interesting. Check out the community’s predictions down below and be sure to follow along as we share more 2025 Health IT Predictions!
Check out our community’s Healthcare Staffing Shortage and Healthcare Burnout predictions:
Jeff Robbins, Founder and CEO at LiveData, Inc.
Since clinician shortages aren’t going away, our talks with provider organizations have increasingly centered on what they can do to retain their existing workforce. Looking ahead to 2025, we expect to see a concentrated effort to acquire tools that improve the lives of clinicians and affiliated practices. As frontline staff continue to increase their say in the purchasing process, solutions that enhance their consistency and happiness are in. Clinicians are pushing back against one-size-fits-all electronic health record (EHR) implementations, prompting companies of all sizes to develop better, customized workflows. The trend is shifting from technology for its own sake to provider-informed tools that prioritize usability and healthcare worker satisfaction.
Ashley Walsh, Chief Revenue Officer at LeanTaaS
It’s become clear that staffing shortages are here to stay, but how health systems choose to respond is where the biggest impact can be made. For instance, health systems are still using “institutional knowledge,” “gut feelings,” and “past performance” to allocate and plan staffing resources, and those traditional methods fall short time and time again. Significant advancements in making predictions based on supply-demand matching have now been available for more than a decade, yet, many health systems are just beginning to catch up with the technology.
Anand Nair, Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences at UST
It’s no surprise that there is a major shortage of primary care providers in the U.S. We will see ambient AI helping to save on charting hours and the administrative burden. But it’s not enough. We predict employers and plans will focus more on primary care and preventive care with a mix of new payment models and hyper-personalized wellness programs to fill the gap.
Charlie Lougheed, Co-Founder and CEO at Axuall
The healthcare industry is bracing for significant staffing challenges as we approach 2025, with predictions indicating significant shortages across various roles and license types. In 2025, McKinsey projects the United States will face a critical shortage of 200,000 to 450,000 nurses available for direct patient care, representing a 10% to 20% shortage in the nursing workforce needed to meet patient demand. Similarly, the physician workforce will experience a deficit of 38,000 to 120,000 physicians by 2034. As demand outpaces what medical schools, nursing programs, and other programs can churn out, the healthcare sector must undergo significant changes to address these challenges and adopt new strategies.
There’s an increasing focus on technological integration, with a growing demand for professionals skilled in AI, data science, and robotics. Healthcare organizations also implement flexible work arrangements, including remote and hybrid models, particularly for administrative and support roles. In 2025, healthcare institutions will prioritize workforce sustainability by implementing technologies that enable them to innovate recruitment, onboarding, care team alignment, and retention strategies. Big data and AI will play an increasing role in this.
Lani Bertrand, Senior Director of Clinical Marketing & Thought Leadership at Omnicell
With the healthcare sector grappling with staffing shortages and burnout, technology will be key in filling gaps and improving workforce efficiency. Pharmacy vacancy rates average 4.3% of full-time pharmacist positions and 9% of full-time pharmacy technician roles in hospitals. The number of hospital pharmacist job postings has risen significantly, up 12% in Q1 2024 compared to the previous year, indicating a growing gap in staffing levels within hospitals. Shortages also extend to the academic level, with pharmacy schools seeing record-low enrollment rates.
There will be an increased focus on exposing future pharmacists and clinicians to the opportunity for technology to alleviate inefficient processes and workflows in medication use, while providing key insights to pharmacy inventory management, freeing up healthcare workers to focus on the critical aspects of patient care. As labor shortages continue to put pressure on the system, technology will not just improve productivity, it will be a lifeline for the industry, allowing hospitals to meet growing demands with fewer resources.
Karen Kobelski, VP and General Manager of Clinical Surveillance Compliance at Wolters Kluwer Health
In 2025, continuing staffing shortages, reliance on per diem or traveling staff, and high turnovers will require more vigilance on behalf of hospitals and health systems in monitoring controlled substances as new clinical teams may not be familiar with policies and procedures. Further, those who divert can more easily switch locations given today’s staffing models. For facilities with more consistent staff, employee wellness remains a priority, and identifying substance use disorder early can ensure employees receive the help they need as quickly as possible. AI-driven surveillance tools will become indispensable, identifying risks more proactively and streamlining investigations with precision and efficiency.
Steve Mok, PharmD, MBA, BCPS, BCIDP, Manager of Pharmacy Services and Fellowship Director at Wolters Kluwer Health
In 2025, worsening workforce shortages of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians will require healthcare organizations to be more creative in their staffing and service models to support patient care. While standardizing clinical practices will help ensure efficiency, technology that can run in the background, surveil the clinical data, and help direct clinical attention and intervention will help improve patient and medication safety. Virtual care combined with these always-on platforms will mitigate the consequences of an alarming rise in “pharmacy deserts” and clinician shortages.
Karyn Wentz, MSN, RN, CPN, Nurse Informaticist for Clinical Surveillance & Compliance at Wolters Kluwer Health
Healthcare organizations across the country continue to experience staffing shortages and increased demands of infection preventionists (IP). According to Bartles et al, lower than expected staffing ratios are associated with higher rates of infection. With the focus on decreasing healthcare-associated infections (HAI) and the increasing reporting requirements and demands of the IP, IPs may find themselves overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with unsustainable workflows. Integrating infection prevention clinical solutions will reduce the burden of clinical surveillance and reporting requirements, giving IPs more time to focus on HAI reduction and other IP-related hospital initiatives.
Megan DeVoe, VP of Coding and CDI Services at AGS Health
Healthcare leaders should anticipate ongoing labor shortages, particularly among clinical staff, which will continue to place immense pressure on these vital resources as administrative demands grow. To prevent burnout and allow clinicians to dedicate more focus to patient care, I believe that in 2025, many organizations will begin exploring onshore, nearshore, and offshore outsourcing models, alongside advanced automation, to support clinical staff with essential administrative tasks like clinical documentation integrity, utilization management, prior authorizations, and clinical denial appeals. This approach will help streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve both patient care and revenue outcomes in the years ahead.
Cheryl Dalton-Norman, President at Conduit Health Partners
When we look at the future of the healthcare workforce, particularly with nurses, in 2025 and beyond we anticipate the continuation of labor shortages, further driving the need for increased efficiencies that enable nurses to be focused on patient bedside care. To achieve this, hospitals and health systems will need to prioritize AI usage for routine tasks and explore outsourcing specialized activities like patient transfers. By doing so, they can reduce transfer times by up to 34%, ensuring patients receive the right care promptly while allowing nurses to focus on their core competency: delivering quality care.
Daniel Cane, Co-CEO at ModMed
As the industry continues to grapple with burnout and staffing shortages, there is a spotlight on technology targeted at saving time and resources for healthcare workers. This year, ambient listening began entering some exam rooms, but in 2025 we can expect a greater uptick, along with a substantial wave of AI integration to support tasks like insurance claims, appointment scheduling, and faxing. We’re about to start seeing measurable results and ROI evaluations for these anticipated use cases.
Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare at NVIDIA
Digital health agents: The dawn of agentic AI and multi-agent systems will address the existential challenges of workforce shortages and the rising cost of care. Administrative health services will become digital humans taking notes for you or making your next appointment, introducing an era of services delivered by software and birthing a service-as-a-software industry. Patient experience will be transformed with always-on, personalized care services while healthcare staff will collaborate with agents that help them reduce clerical work, retrieve and summarize patient histories, and recommend clinical trials and state-of-the-art treatments for their patients.
Daniela Catallo-Lockhard, Vice President at Healthtech Consultants, a Nordic Global Company
In 2025, AI will become a definitive solution to the healthcare workforce crisis, by enhancing workflows, reducing burnout, and enabling clinicians to have more time to focus on patient care. AI-powered tools like ambient voice technology, predictive analytics, and workflow automation will alleviate administrative burdens, streamline clinical decision-making, and improve operational efficiency. These innovations will allow clinicians to spend more time with patients, enhancing both care quality and provider satisfaction.
Automating repetitive tasks such as appointment scheduling, data entry, and results tracking will reduce cognitive overload and mitigate burnout, while advanced decision-support systems will offer real-time insights at the point of care. Healthcare leaders must also balance technological integration with human-centered strategies, such as education, training, and empathetic patient care, to ensure AI augments, rather than replaces, the human connection in healthcare. AI will empower a more resilient and engaged healthcare workforce, forging a future where clinicians thrive and patient outcomes benefit.
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a prediction to us and thank you to all of you for taking the time to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support. What do you think will happen for Staffing Shortages and Burnout in 2025? Let us know on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!
Be sure to check out all of Healthcare IT Today’s Staffing Shortage and Burnout content and our other 2025 Health IT Predictions.
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