CMO Offers 3 Healthcare Predictions for 2025

Lifepoint Health's top clinical officer says technology and health equity will be dominant themes next year.

AI, health equity, and telehealth will be healthcare hotbeds in 2025, according to Chris Frost, MD, senior vice president, chief medical officer, and chief quality officer at Lifepoint Health.

Frost was named to his current position at Lifepoint in July. He has served in two other leadership roles at the Brentwood, Tennessee-based health system: chief medical officer of Lifepoint Communities and national medical director of hospital-based services. He is a member of the HealthLeaders CMO Exchange.

Prediction 1: Healthcare AI developments will accelerate

First and foremost, Frost believes adoption of AI tools in healthcare will proliferate in 2025, adding ambient listening technology for clinician-patient encounters will become ubiquitous next year.

"The AI works parallel to the clinician and the patient, capturing all of the information then dropping that information into the medical record," Frost says. "It takes unstructured data—the conversation—and organizes it in a structured format that is consistent with the architecture of the medical record."

In addition to generating documentation, ambient listening technology separates the signal from the noise, Frost explains.

"If the physician and the patient are talking, and the physician takes the conversation off to a tangent that has little or nothing to do with the patient's symptoms or complaints," Frost says, "the AI will parse that out and discard that extraneous information."

In 2025, ambient listening technology will include prompts for clinicians, according to Frost.

"For example, AI is going to listen to a conversation between a clinician and a patient," Frost says, "and if the patient tells the clinician something interesting about travel history or an exotic pet that they own, the AI is going to prompt the clinician to ask the patient about environmental exposure or zoonotic infection from the pet."

Virtual sitting in the hospital setting is another AI technology that will take off in 2025, according to Frost.

"As we grapple with workforce challenges," Frost says, "any technology that we can leverage that allows our clinicians and our nursing staff to practice at the top of their licenses rather than be distracted with other tasks is going to be helpful."

AI tools that provide a virtual sitting function are most helpful in reducing fall risk, Frost explains, and if a patient is considered a fall risk, a virtual sitting AI tool can alert the nursing staff to rush to the patient's room.

"It has an algorithm that can distinguish between a patient shifting in bed to get comfortable versus movements that may signify that the patient is about to get out of bed," Frost says. "We can get a person in the room to help the patient to the restroom or to get something for the patient."

In 2025, there will be an emphasis on AI development to have tools that complement rather than conflict with clinical work streams, according to Frost.

"We have learned from the electronic health record experience what not to do," Frost says. "We learned that introducing an EHR does not win the day if you do not take the time to work with the clinicians and nurses to integrate the EHR with the clinical workflow."

Additionally, AI engineers will listen, watch, and learn before they deploy AI tools, Frost explains.

"The technology will adapt to the person rather than the person adapting to the technology," Frost says.

Chris Frost, MD, is senior vice president, chief medical officer, and chief quality officer at Lifepoint Health.

Prediction 2: Health equity reaches crossroad

In 2025, there will be a reckoning for health equity efforts, according to Frost.

"Health equity has already grabbed a foothold in healthcare, but in 2025, we will find where health equity shakes out," Frost says. "Does it stay a central focus of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as well as The Joint Commission around health disparities and social determinants of health? Or does health equity get swept up in some of the culture wars that we see in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)."

Next year, Frost believes health equity is going to be caught between two competing forces.

"There is the DEI side of the tug of war on one side and anti-wokeness on the other side," Frost says. "CMS and The Joint Commission have done a thoughtful and deliberate job around using data to identify patients who may be at greatest risk for adverse health outcomes because of health disparities or social determinants of health that are not being met."

Frost explains that the industry is moving in the right direction by addressing health equity.

"For clinicians and the healthcare arena, health equity allows us to address things that we have not paid much attention to historically," Frost says. "We are moving in the right direction by focusing on health equity, and I hope it does not get caught up in culture wars. That will be a focus for 2025, and I do not know how it is going to shake out."

Prediction 3: Telehealth revolution continues

Telehealth will continue to gain momentum in 2025, whether it is telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, remote therapeutic monitoring, or expansion of wearables, according to Frost.

Frost is bullish on telehealth because there is an estimated shortfall of nearly 90,000 physicians by 2036.

"We are going to see fewer specialists in nonurban and rural communities—fewer rheumatologists, neurologists, infectious disease doctors, and endocrinologists," Frost says. "We are going to be dependent on providing access to care through telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and remote therapeutic monitoring."

Remote patient monitoring will be supplemented by remote therapeutic monitoring in 2025, Frost explains.

Remote patient monitoring allows clinicians to gather information about a disease process to get updates on indicators of the disease. For congestive heart failure, it largely involves daily monitoring of a patient's weight. For hypertension, it involves gathering blood pressure readings multiple times per day. Based on that information, care teams can adjust diuretic doses or blood pressure medication.

Remote therapeutic monitoring takes remote care to the next level, according to Frost.

"There is a component of monitoring but there is also a component of therapeutic guidance from algorithms," Frost says. "The clinical algorithms are embedded within the monitoring process. It provides clinical decision support for clinicians and patients."

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