2027 trends to watch: A growing older population will intensify the burden of age-related disease

America keeps getting older, bringing new opportunities and challenges for the healthcare system to adapt to.

In 2020, around 55.8 million Americans were age 65 or older, representing 17% of the country, or roughly 1 in 6 people. By 2024, that figure had increased to 61.2 million, or 18% of the population. The older population grew 13% between 2020 and 2024—considerably faster than the 1.4% growth among working-age adults ages 18 to 64.

The shift is more visible in certain regions than others. In 2024, senior adults outnumbered children under 18 in 11 states and nearly half of counties in the U.S. Just four years ago, this was only true of three states and just under a third of U.S. counties.

This demographic transition has serious implications for healthcare. Older adults are more likely to live with multiple chronic conditions, require ongoing treatment and medication management, and eventually need support with activities of daily living.

These challenges fall onto an industry already facing workforce shortages, rising costs, reimbursement pressures, and growing demand for more efficient, patient-focused care delivery.

Provider organizations and the companies that support them need to reckon with an operational and economic reality: an expanding population of older adults creates more healthcare need, but growing demand does not automatically translate into growth, especially long-term.

Healthcare organizations will need to gain data-backed insights into where older populations are growing, where disease burden is concentrated, how patients are accessing care, and which providers are equipped to serve them. They’ll also need a basic understanding of emerging technologies and care models, and how they can reduce the cost and complexity of delivering care to older patients.

The growing burden of age-related disease

Aging itself isn’t a disease, of course. But advancing age is associated with greater prevalence of chronic disease and multimorbidity.

Among adults age 85 and older, for example, hypertension was reported by 67% of people in 2022–2023, making it the most commonly reported chronic condition in the U.S., followed by arthritis at 56% and high cholesterol at 47%. More than one-third of adults in this age group reported four or more of the 11 chronic conditions examined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Other common chronic conditions among older adults include heart disease, diabetes, cancer, respiratory diseases like COPD, neurological conditions such as dementia, and depression.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ’s) analysis of 2019 data found that hypertension, hyperlipidemia (i.e., high cholesterol), and arthritis or other joint disorders were the three most commonly treated conditions among adults aged 65 and older. Heart disease and cancer generated the highest total healthcare spending among the nine commonly treated conditions analyzed.

Overlapping conditions bring unique challenges to care delivery, and they’re increasingly common with age. Nearly 8 in 10 older adults have two or more chronic conditions, according to a CDC study of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 2013 to 2023. While chronic disease prevalence among adults aged 65 and older remained steady across this period, prevalence increased among younger adults, with the greatest increase occurring among the youngest sampled cohort (18–34 years).

The complexity of caring for patients with multimorbidity has implications across the healthcare ecosystem. Patients may require an array of specialists, medications, diagnostics, and procedures, as well as various forms of domestic support. Providers need to be able to coordinate these treatment factors across care settings—a significant challenge in an increasingly decentralized delivery environment—while payors, suppliers, and other organizations face pressure to manage utilization and costs.

The rising financial burden of aging

The cost of managing age-related disease also extends well beyond traditional medical spending—and it’s growing.

Long-term care can place a particularly significant financial burden on patients and their families. CareScout’s 2025 Cost of Care Survey found that the national median cost of a private nursing home room was $129,575 per year, while assisted living cost $74,400 annually. For people receiving 44 hours of nonmedical caregiver services per week, the annual median cost was $80,080.

In the cases of nursing home and assisted living services, the rising cost of care from 2022 to 2025 outpaced inflation during the same period, growing 16% and 22% respectively.

These costs highlight why healthcare organizations are increasingly interested in alternatives that can keep people healthier and independent for longer. Preventive care, chronic disease management, remote monitoring, home-based care, and technologies that reduce unnecessary utilization can all play a role in shifting care toward lower-cost settings.

But implementing these approaches at scale highlights another barrier: there is a growing gap between demand for care and the supply of professionals able to deliver it.

Workforce shortages could constrain capacity

Long-term care providers are already operating in a difficult workforce environment.

An American Health Care Association survey conducted in 2022 found that nearly all nursing homes (98%) faced staffing challenges, with 87% experiencing moderate-to-high staffing shortages. Sixty percent of nursing home providers said staffing shortages were limiting their ability to accept new patients.

Assisted living providers reported similar challenges, with 63% reporting staffing shortages and 87% facing difficulty hiring new staff. Nearly all said they had asked staff to work overtime or accept additional shifts to address the shortages, potentially fomenting burnout, turnover, and subsequently intensified staffing deficits.

As the older population grows, these constraints could make it increasingly difficult to simply add more labor to meet rising demand.

That creates an opening for technologies and services that can help organizations do more with existing resources. Automation, remote monitoring, clinical decision support, virtual care, medication management, workforce optimization, and other technologies may help providers extend their capacity without relying solely on additional staff.

For medtech and software/IT companies heading into 2027, demonstrating value will mean demonstrating how they can reduce workload, improve throughput, lower costs, or enable care in settings where labor is constrained.

Medication access adds another layer of complexity

Medication management is another important consideration for providers, pharmacies, and other healthcare organizations serving an aging population.

Older adults are more likely to take multiple medications and to require ongoing treatment for chronic conditions. However, medication shortages create obstacles to consistent treatment, especially for patients managing multiple conditions. One study found that older patients were about twice as likely to be impacted by medication shortages than those aged 18–24.

While the U.S. tends to maintain a deep inventory of pharmaceuticals, shortages are becoming more intensive. On average, drug shortages now last more than five years, up from approximately two years in 2019. Drug product discontinuations are also at their highest since 2019, with a 60% spike in discontinuations occurring between 2024 and 2025.

Around 44% of drugs facing shortages rely on at least one key starting material (KSM) sourced from a single country, most often India or China. Because these countries route considerable portions of their supply chain through the Middle East, medication access and logistical costs are at risk of further disruption as the war in Iran forces pharmaceutical companies to divert products through alternative routes.

For healthcare organizations and life sciences companies, this reinforces the importance of understanding not just disease prevalence, but also the practical realities of delivering treatment—including medication access, prescribing patterns, provider capacity, and the availability of alternative therapies.

Chronic disease is impacting younger patients, too

As demand for services associated with age-related disease increases, healthcare organizations should be prepared to dedicate more resources to younger patients, as chronic disease is increasingly a burden for people earlier in life.

A CDC analysis of 2019 data found that 54% of adults ages 18 to 34 had at least one chronic condition, while 22% had multiple chronic conditions. Obesity, depression, and high blood pressure were the most commonly reported conditions.

More recent research reinforces the importance of addressing chronic disease across the life span, noting that conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol can contribute to more serious conditions including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, some cancers, and arthritis.

Cancer provides an acute example of why healthcare organizations need to look beyond traditional age boundaries.

Colorectal cancer incidence has been declining among older adults while rising among younger adults. National Cancer Institute (NCI) data shows that from 2013 through 2022, incidence increased 3.8% annually among people ages 15 to 39 and 1.2% annually among those ages 40 to 64, while declining among adults 65 and older.

A 2026 analysis from the American Cancer Society similarly found that colorectal cancer incidence among adults younger than 50 increased by between 2% and 4% annually from 2013 to 2022. Today, 1 in 5 diagnoses occurs in a person under the age of 55.

This means organizations supporting care for chronic diseases must increasingly serve patients across a much broader age spectrum. Chronic disease management cannot be designed solely around the needs of an aging population; it must also account for patients who develop significant health needs during their working-age years.

Companies operating in this space need the latest data to fully understand how care is delivered, where patients seek it, and how healthcare organizations engage them.

For healthcare organizations, demand does not automatically equal growth

It may be tempting to view a growing older population as an expanding market for every healthcare company. But population growth and healthcare opportunity aren’t inherently interchangeable.

The ability to convert demand into sustainable growth is complicated by evolving market factors.

Reimbursement models continue to shift

As value-based reimbursement supplants traditional fee-for-service models, healthcare organizations face new incentives to control costs while maintaining or improving outcomes.

Providers, payors, and health systems may be reluctant to adopt technologies or services that add to expenses, even when the underlying relevant patient population is growing. Under these conditions, commercial opportunities are more likely to depend on measurable economic or operational benefits than clinical performance alone.

Depending on the specialization of the company in question, this might mean demonstrating that a device reduces hospitalizations or complications, or that a technology system can increase capacity without adding proportional labor. On the provider front, it could mean bringing chronic condition management into lower-cost outpatient settings.

From a strategic intelligence perspective, this shifts the focus away from identifying the sheer volume of patients needing care and toward a deeper understanding of long-term, sustainable models for delivering that care.

Medicare Advantage creates additional complexity

The growth of Medicare Advantage adds another consideration for organizations serving older adults.

Administered by private payors under contract with the federal government, Medicare Advantage plans implement prior authorization and utilization management processes more extensively than original Medicare, which can limit access to certain services and out-of-network care in exchange for lower premiums and bundled benefits.

Prior authorization, utilization management, and payor-specific coverage policies can influence whether and how services are delivered. In 2024, Medicare Advantage insurers made nearly 53 million prior authorization determinations and fully or partially denied 4.1 million requests, or nearly 8% of all determinations. This not only impacts patients’ access to care, but can also reduce providers’ autonomy—and the reliability of their revenue streams. In response, some providers are no longer accepting Medicare Advantage plans at all.

CMS has implemented new requirements it says are intended to streamline prior authorization, improve transparency, and reduce disruptions to care. But the policy actually expands prior authorization into original Medicare for certain services, introducing an administrative layer that could make care more difficult to obtain for some patients. Beginning in 2026, impacted payors are also required to publicly report certain prior authorization metrics.

For companies selling into healthcare, understanding these dynamics is critical. In a healthcare ecosystem that increasingly empowers payors to determine who receives care, under which circumstances, and for how long, providers are put on the back foot both clinically and financially. A technology may address a significant clinical need, but adoption can still depend on reimbursement, coverage criteria, utilization management, provider workflow, and the economic incentives of the organizations purchasing it.

The real growth opportunity: delivering more care with fewer resources

The demographic shift does create opportunities—but many of them are tied to efficiency and changes in where and how care is delivered.

Reduce the cost to serve

As the number of patients with complex and chronic conditions grows, healthcare organizations will need ways to manage those patients without simply increasing the amount of labor required.

Technologies that automate administrative work, support clinical decision-making, enable remote monitoring, improve medication adherence, or facilitate care coordination may help organizations manage larger populations with existing resources.

The strongest opportunities are likely to be found where technology can connect better patient outcomes with lower costs or greater operational capacity.

Meet younger patients where they are

The rise of chronic disease among younger adults also creates a need for healthcare experiences that look different from traditional models.

Younger patients may be more accustomed to digital-first interactions, including mobile health tools, virtual visits, and online scheduling. They’re more likely to put flexibility and personalization first. Chronic care that traditionally began in a physician’s office may more frequently involve interactions across a broader ecosystem of digital and community-based services.

For organizations developing or selling these solutions, understanding the populations most likely to use them—and the providers and markets most prepared to adopt them—can be just as important as understanding overall disease prevalence.

Create onramps outside of traditional care pathways

The combination of aging, chronic disease, workforce shortages, and rising costs is pushing healthcare beyond the traditional hospital-and-clinic model.

Home-based and virtual care, remote patient monitoring, ambulatory services, community-based care, and other distributed models can potentially help patients receive appropriate services without relying exclusively on resource-intensive settings.

This shift also changes the data healthcare organizations need.

Instead of looking only at where patients receive care today, organizations may need to understand where patients live in relation to care sites, what services they use, where and how they consume information, and what signals suggest they may need care in the future.

This is particularly important as healthcare becomes more geographically and operationally decentralized.

Turning demographic change into actionable healthcare intelligence

The aging of the U.S. population goes beyond shifting demographics. This change has the potential to alter markets, workforces, reimbursement models, and care delivery.

The population age 65 and older has grown substantially, and that growth is occurring alongside increasing multimorbidity and demand for long-term and chronic care. At the same time, chronic disease is affecting younger adults, creating healthcare needs across a wider portion of the population.

For healthcare organizations and the companies that serve them, the challenge is to translate these broad trends into actionable insights:

• Where are older populations growing fastest?
• Where is the burden of specific diseases highest?
• Which markets have sufficient provider capacity?
• Where are staffing constraints most severe?
• Which organizations are positioned to adopt new technologies?
• Where are patients seeking care outside traditional settings?

Answering those questions requires connected intelligence on populations, providers, organizations, claims, clinical conditions, utilization, and consumer behaviors.

Definitive Healthcare’s data and analytics portfolio delivers this intelligence through the systems and workflows that work best for your organization. Want to see how we can help you and your team find opportunities in demographic change? Sign up for a demo today.