Four trends from HLTH25
If you want to be re-energized about healthcare, the HLTH conference is the place to be. This year, it brought together 12K+ healthcare professionals, including nearly 3K CEOs, to discuss and dream about the future of healthcare.
HLTH is known for tech optimism, and frankly, a heavy dose of jargon. A quick walk through the expo floor and you see more buzzwords than a startup pitch deck: “AI”, “interoperability,” “synergy,” “patient-centric ecosystems.” This year, the hype was there, but 2025’s event was slightly less about what might happen in healthcare and more about what already is. And that was a breath of fresh air.
AI moved from demo booths to hospital command centers. Pharma, wellness, and retail players all continue to vie to own the patient experience. And trust and transparency were core to the conversation.
For healthcare marketing leaders, we had a few big takeaways.
Your audience is changing, fast. (think: AI-driven patients and TikTok health fluency)
As an industry, we’ve been discussing consumerism and consumer empowerment for years, but now it’s coming to life in new ways: patients turning to AI for health information and diagnoses. Consumers looking to the wellness industry for truths about health. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Competitors continue to multiply.
The expo floor was bigger than ever this year, full to the brim with B2C and B2B solutions. For consumers, ads for AG1 run right up against ads for Wegovy and their local health system—often, all with the same message: we make you healthier. For businesses, the number of point solutions is out of control, and they all have equally jargon-ey and confusing messaging about what they really offer. Never before has it been more needed for marketers to cut through the messaging clutter with plain, simple, direct language.
In an era of tech and innovation, human connection is more important than ever.
Coming out of HLTH, one of the biggest takeaways was actually about the magic of live events… we saw physicians excitedly brainstorming with each other, VCs funding start-up founders, and patients rubbing shoulders with healthcare leaders. As marketers, we spend most of our days getting words on a digital screen right, but sometimes don’t have the opportunity to create in-person events and moments of connection like we could.
With those marketing takeaways behind us, in the coming week’s we’ll be outlining 4 big trends about the healthcare industry we saw coming out of HLTH.
