In the first inaugural What Patients Want Report, Zocdoc founder and CEO, Oliver Kharraz, MD shared patient and industry predictions for 2024. This year, our second annual What Patients Want report delved deeper into how patient preferences are evolving and year-over-year changes. You can download the full report here.
As we look towards 2025, Kharraz shares his patient and industry predictions.
Patient Predictions
1. Patients will become more comfortable interacting with AI solutions, particularly for administrative healthcare tasks.
While the primary focus on AI in healthcare has been on provider- facing clinical use cases (e.g. AI scribes), 2025 will be the year when AI begins to have patient-facing benefits. This will start with streamlining administrative tasks surrounding their interactions with healthcare providers (e.g. coverage verification, scheduling, referral or prior authorization requests, prescription refills, etc.). While interacting with AI to fulfill these needs may feel foreign at first, as with all novel technologies, users will migrate to the solution that delivers a superior experience and greater convenience. 2025 will be the year patients begin to gain comfort with AI assistants as part of the way they interface with healthcare, and this comfort will grow as they experience AI’s value and utility firsthand.
2. Patients will continue to experiment with cash pay healthcare services.
Given the persisting rise in both healthcare costs and adoption of high-deductible plans, Americans will increasingly consider care services that offer guaranteed, upfront, transparent pricing. This will particularly accelerate when it comes to prescriptions and more novel longevity-focused diagnostics, including bundled services like labs and MRIs. While patients have historically been conditioned to stay in-network, they still have some uncertainty when it comes to their out-of-pocket costs. At the same time, they are starting to view healthcare more as a consumer-driven category, and as that happens, we will see more niche cash pay services take off.
3. Increased availability and decreased prices for commercial GLP-1s will lead to greater adoption.
With supply bottlenecks decreasing, there will be increased competition among commercial GLP-1s with similar effectiveness profiles. This will bring down high list prices for these drugs, making them more accessible to Americans who have been unable to afford the high out-of-pocket costs. At the same time, compounders—which served as a Band-Aid during a time of scarcity—will be phased out as consumers opt for less expensive, more reliable FDA-approved versions that will become more broadly accessible.
How the industry will shift in 2025
1. We will see scale deployment of AI solutions that reduce the administrative burden for healthcare providers.
Again, much of the focus on AI in healthcare has been on clinical use cases that require supervision and, as such, don’t add to increasing capacity. But 2025 will be a breakout year for AI solutions that can function efficiently and autonomously to handle non-clinical administrative processes. A prime opportunity is training AI to handle providers’ outbound and inbound calls for a variety of administrative needs, streamlining the experience for both sides of the transaction. This is an opportunity to significantly reduce the estimated $600 billion to $1 trillion spent in healthcare related to non-clinical administrative tasks, and redirect valuable healthcare workforce resources toward delivering exceptional patient care.
2. Amazon will materially restructure its healthcare offerings.
Tech giants have had a notable lack of traction in healthcare, and Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all learned firsthand that this space is not easy to disrupt from the outside in. While most have retrenched, Amazon has persisted.
Despite various pivots, it has not yet been able to show traction in this space. For a company that prizes efficiency, it is untenable to continue to carry hundreds of millions in losses. 2025 will be the year that they determine that they don’t have the margins to make healthcare work, and managing healthcare providers is a very different business than managing logistics. We may see a pivot that prioritizes pharmacy—which is more aligned with their core competencies and is more scalable—and divests other care services.
3. With a new Administration in place in 2025, there will be a reshuffling of federal healthcare priorities.
While the new Administration’s agenda will become more clear in the first 100 days, we are anticipating an increased focus on consumer-directed health plans, new tactics on information blocking rules, a less stringent regulatory approach to AI, a continued interest in unlocking price transparency and reducing surprising billing, and changes to prior authorization policy. We are also anticipating a regulatory environment that tinkers with requirements of Medicare Advantage plans and could be more favorable to certain types of healthcare M&A.
Reach out today to learn more about how you can make the most of 2025.