As HIMSS 2025, the largest annual conference on health information and innovation meets up in Las Vegas this week, we can peek into what’s on the organization’s CEO’s mind leading up to the meeting in this conversation between Hal Wolf, CEO of HIMSS, and Gil Bashe, Managing Director of FINN Partners. If you are unfamiliar with HIMSS, Hal explains in the discussion that HIMSS’s four focuses are digital health transformation, the deployment and utilization of AI as a tool, cybersecurity to protect peoples’ personal information and its use, and, workforce development.

I have my own research agenda(s) underneath these themes that I’ll be listening for at #HIMSS25. What helps me stay focused in this ever-changing field is the True North of the Quintuple Aim — particularly useful given this year’s event’s theme: “Creating Tomorrow’s Health.”

Gil writes in his interview leading up to HIMSS 2025 that, “With the health-ecosystem landscape tracking the early days of a new administration, uncertainties remain—ranging from regulatory shifts to funding allocations.”

So given the many “uncertainties” facing the U.S. health care ecosystem in March 2025, and adjacent industry sectors that bolster human health, I turn to the Quintuple Aim as a useful lens or telescope for us to use in considering “tomorrow’s health” given where we are “today.”

Let’s first place the Quintuple Aim in health-historical context: the concept originated in 2007, developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), as a leaner “three-legged” version, the Triple Aim.. The original three pillars addressed improved patient experience, driving better outcomes, and lowering costs.

In 2014, three pillars grew to four, adding in clinician well-being with the recognition that doctors and nurses were experiencing burnout and stress. Then, in 2021 — with pandemic-era learnings — four pillars grew to five, adding in health equity.

Thus the Quintuple Aim is composed of five pillars of objectives which together can bolster health care quality and sustainability. While each goal on its own is a critical driver of high performing health systems, working the five as a strategic quintet can benefit individual patients, families, communities, and the nations that fund (or share in funding) health care services to the country’s residents.

Those five pillars are,

  • To drive population health outcomes (and public health)
  • To enhance the health care experience for patients and families
  • To reduce per capita costs (that is, costs per patient)
  • To address clinician wellness and ameliorate burnout among doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and allied health professionals, and,
  • To embed health equity in plans, services, and workflows.

Now I’ll share some of my early takes on how each of these could play out at 2025 HIMSS’s featured innovations and announcements..

Drive population health. Among the many benefits those bullish on AI’s use in health care offer is large language models’ ability to, with the right data and well-designed algorithms, personalize health in many ways: for example, to more effectively and timely diagnose, tailor therapeutic regimens for individual patients, and develop communications materials designed for specific groups of people based on their preferences. We’ll see dozens of vendors with AI-baked into offerings that speak to population health, especially as value-based care continues to be demanded by certain payers and health plan benefit designs.

Enhance the health care experience.  For several years, I was a member of HIMSS Patient Engagement committee from its launch around 2013. Shortly thereafter, I did an analysis for HIMSS’ leadership on the emergence of the patient voice and how it could play into HIMSS’s mission which, until then, was quite institutional and provider-focused. At that point, the Consumer Technology Association (convener of CES)was in growth mode in digital health, and South-by-Southwest’s inclusion of digital health on the interactive track was also in early stage growth mode.

Gratefully, the patient voice has more play at HIMSS annual conferences, and the education sessions in 2025 feature various takes on patient and family experience. The growth of wearable technology, need and desire for real-world evidence and patient feedback, and especially patients’ growing role in paying for health care (think: high deductibles, co-insurance, and the challenge of medical debt) all drive the need to enhance the health care experience for patients in consumer and retail grades.

Reduce per capita costs.  Speaking of medical bills and payment, revenue cycle management is a perennially important issue covered at HIMSS and vendors continue to innovate for the patient financial experience. Reducing costs, per patient, can help in this regard, so using resources more effectively by leveraging the right technology at the right time is an opportunity to explore every year at HIMSS. At this year’s conference, AI deployed for scribes and workflow productivity is becoming a kind of table stakes entry-point for GenAI (see the burnout issue below). But streamlining can also lower workforce costs, where labor expenses are a major part of health spending in the hospital and physician office setting. How else might we leverage technology to reduce costs per patient? Telehealth and remote health monitoring, virtually “seeing” and treatment patients in lower cost settings (such as the home) is one key strategy for value-based care. Deploying multidisciplinary care teams can also help reduce per capita costs – see this on “reimagining the primary care dream team” here in Health Populi to learn that PCPs would favor adding a nutritionist or dietician to their teams which could help patients better deal with nutrition and the role of food-as-medicine (consider the obesity and overweight challenges many patients face, and with which many physicians must deal in conjunction with other chronic conditions that travel in pairs and triples (e.g., diabetes, obesity, blood pressure).

Address clinician burnout and bolster well-being. The 2025 Medscape Physician Mental Health & Well-Being Report found that nearly one-half of U.S. physicians were facing burnout and 24% experiencing depression., Ironically, the adoption and implementation of electronic health records technology accelerate some aspects of burnout due to the systems lacking interoperability and user-centered design workflows. Now it’s another technology, AI, that’s begun to be seen as a helpmate for addressing burnout. This week’s announcement timed with #HIMSS25 from Microsoft about deploying Dragon Copilot for clinicians to streamline workflow and bolster productivity directly speaks to clinician burnout. Other IT innovations are helping enable team-based care and interoperability; see Validic’s work with AWS as one example in this space (in this instance, health IoT and remote patient monitoring), but that’s just one of many applications to seek out to ameliorate this crucial challenge.

Embed health equity. We learned a lot about health equity and disparities during the pandemic: one key driver of health (or social determinant of health, SDoH) which had been one of my talking points since writing about it in the Huffington Post in 2016 was connectivity — the Internet kind of connection. It became clear quite quickly that people who lacked WiFi or other form of digital data connection would not be able to accomplish many life-flows to which public or company policies pivoted: namely, working from home, going to school from home, attending faith services from home, cooking at home (and sourcing groceries from home), engaging in fitness from home, and so on. Folks who did not have connectivity could not participate in what became newly normal workflows for mainstream people.

Five years later in 2021, three physicians from UCSF wrote about the importance of focusing on digital health equity, one slide of the health equity challenge, in JAMA — calling out the fact that, “health care is on the cusp of a digital transformation that could harm health equity or improve it.”

That was one area of health equity that became evident in early 2020.

Health Populi’s Hot Points: As famous ad pitchman Ron Popeil popularized in his iconic Veg-O-Matic commercials, “Wait! There’s more!” Because we also found long lines of autos in suburban places all over America where middle-class families queued up to get bags of food they could no longer afford at the grocery from food pantries, challenged to channel bags of healthy groceries to local residents. Here’s one of the photos I am still using in talks about SDoH and health justice, where food — and access to it — is a key driver of health and well-being.

The Q Aim of addressing health equity will require more than AI and tech innovations. We will require public policies’ and private sector organizations’ mindful planning to first recognize health equity as an issue that is part of “our job” and a value in the health ecosystem; and secondly, to design programs that resonate with people based on their own values and experiences (consider: a community’s ethnicity, the age of a targeted population, or a patient group’s lived experience). With any design, if you build it and people don’t come, it’s a fail (the Field-of-Dreams effect). This is as true for patient portals as it is for nutrition support and medication adherence programs and for engaging patients-as-payors in creative revenue-cycle management strategies.

Another component of health equity is peoples’ access to health insurance (mostly an SDoH risk factor in the U.S., less so in the rest of the world covered by various forms of universal health care and private/public sector health insurance regimes).

Now return to Gil Bashe’s call-out of  uncertainties in this moment of U.S. health care. We must accept uncertainties in our forecasting and planning for coverage of Medicaid and Medicare, as well as VA health care, in the current environment — because we don’t know what we don’t know about plans for each of these programs through the Federal lens. If we look broadly at the drivers of health, including factors such as a steady job offering health insurance, secure housing, clean air and water, and food security, the public policies underlying each of these driving forces for health also factor into health citizens’ health status and well-being.

There must be dot-connecting between, for example, the potential negative impact(s) that tariffs on Canada and Mexico might have on commodities such as lumber. Lumber is key to home-building, and a 25% tax on lumber imported into the U.S. means that costs for building that new house increase out of the range of some buyers (or builders before that), which then has an effect on jobs, incomes, and then the service and retail businesses which those consumers patronize. We thus must expand our view of “health economics” to more macro-economics. And that’s just in the instance of modeling the impact of tariffs on the health/care economy. (See this recent post on the topic).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Atlanta Fed revised the U.S. GDP downward overnight, a big negative downturn since one week ago, which is an important macroeconomic development that is concerning — and another context point for health care’s role in the national economy.

As you kick the proverbial tires on the innovations you’ll explore at #HIMSS25, do keep one foot on the ground in Vegas with your innovation lens on, and the other foot in the pragmatic world of “now” into coming months and years for what we know-we-know about health and health care, and honesty and humility about what we know we don’t know.

Remember, you’re at HIMSS where it’s all about “Creating Tomorrow’s Health.” Looking forward to hearing from you about what you’re seeing and inspired by at #HIMSS25.