Healthcare Leaders Eye 2025 for Growth Despite Affordability Concerns
Healthcare executives are entering 2025 with renewed optimism, according to Deloitte's latest US healthcare industry outlook. Nearly 60 percent of leaders express a favorable outlook, with 69 percent anticipating revenue increases and 71 percent expecting improved profitability.
The dual challenge? Balancing growth strategies while ensuring healthcare remains affordable for consumers. Executives cite developing growth strategies (65 percent) and addressing consumer affordability (46 percent) as their top priorities for the year ahead.
Health plans and systems are taking different approaches. Plans are focusing on transformative technologies like generative AI, while systems prioritize strengthening legacy technologies and addressing persistent workforce challenges. Both sectors recognize that no single strategy will suffice in today's complex market.
The Trump administration adds another layer of uncertainty, with 44 percent of executives indicating regulatory changes could influence their strategies in 2025.
No Pain, All Gain from New Drug Class
Developing new non-addictive pain medications has been a fraught enterprise for years, but a new drug class could create new therapeutic options for patients.
Numerous failures, denials by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the ever-present placebo effect, which inexplicably does a decent job in providing pain relief in clinical trials and impacts statistical significance for active drug arms, all have hindered development of new drugs. But Vertex surmounted all of these hurdles, scoring a big win on Jan. 30 when the FDA approved its first-in-class non-opioid analgesic called Journavx, to treat moderate to severe acute pain in adults.
Now, other companies working on developing pain medications are starting to see investor interest. Endpoints News reported Feb. 18 that Latigo Biotherapeutics, a company working on non-opioid pain therapies, is targeting up to $150 million in a new funding round. Both Vertex’s medicine and Latigo’s block the same sodium channel that send pain signals to the brain.
The potential growth of this new drug class for different types of pain has been the talk of researchers and scientists who have worked in this area, Yale School of Medicine wrote last year.
Rural Health Gets AI-Powered Mobile Update
What happens when you combine cutting-edge AI with mobile healthcare? The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. an independent agency within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is betting millions that the combination could transform rural medicine.
The government agency recently selected 12 teams to develop various aspects of these mobile clinics — from rugged CT scanners to modular vehicle designs that can be reconfigured like "cargo containers on a train."
One team, led by the University of Michigan, received $25 million to build an AI assistant that can guide healthcare workers through specialized procedures they wouldn't normally perform.
"We want to bring the hospital to the house, or to the church parking lot," said Jason Corso, director of the AI project and University of Michigan professor of robotics, electrical engineering and computer science.