If you want to understand a particular patient population or provider market, the right real-world healthcare data and analytical tools offer the clarity you need to find and prioritize opportunities, size up competitors, and identify obstacles.
But if you’re looking for a more holistic read on the industry at large, nothing beats getting up close and personal with the people who have a professional stake in the news, trends, and challenges shaping its daily operations and future outlooks. And there are few better places to find those folks en masse than a healthcare conference.
Over the course of 2025, the Definitive Healthcare blog covered more than a dozen key industry events attended by our data specialists. From the AANS Annual Scientific Meeting to ViVE, we’ve captured insights from casual conversations and keynote sessions alike for a variety of professional segments and therapy areas. Below, you can find our summary of the top six trends shaping the healthcare conference circuit in 2025.
AI is (almost) everything to everyone
By a massive margin, the topic we heard discussed most at healthcare conferences in 2025 was artificial intelligence. This disruptive technology has changed the way entire industries do business, with a wide range of applications across healthcare segments:
Life sciences
Biopharma companies at the 2025 PMSA Annual Conference discussed how they’re integrating generative AI and large language models into workflows including medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) affairs reviews, sales enablement, and high-speed insight generation. And at Pharma SOS 2025, our own data specialists explained how biopharma teams can use natural language processing to better understand and engage with patients.
On the medical affairs side of the life sciences, several companies at the 2025 MAPS Americas Conference broke down how generative AI is simplifying responses to medical inquiries, producing insights from field interactions, and hastening med affairs content creation at scale.
Marketing and sales
The healthcare marketing and sales experts at the 30th annual HMPS Summit outlined how AI is helping commercial organizations to automate routine tasks, personalize outreach, and improve campaign performance.
Pharmacy
Specialty pharmacies are also leveraging AI tools to monitor patients for nonadherence risk, identify social determinants of health, track therapy progress, and build strategies based on the analysis of massive datasets, as explored at the AXS25 Summit.
Providers
Agentic AI’s ability to address providers’ operational and clinical pain points was heavily hyped at HLTH 2025, with applications in revenue cycle management, care management, value-based care, and more. We also heard plenty about AI’s potential to enhance clinical decision-making and improve patient outcomes at HIMSS 2025.
In oncology, AI can help pathologists more accurately diagnose cancers based on specific and easy-to-miss biomarkers, according to findings presented at ASCO 2025.
Neurosurgeons are getting help from AI too, with the 2025 AANS Annual Scientific Meeting specifically highlighting the technology’s impact on diagnostics, decision making, and backend operations.
Staffing
Staffing agencies are using AI to automate, streamline, and reduce errors within hiring processes from sourcing to credentialing, as we learned at the 2025 SIA Healthcare Staffing Summit. Healthcare organizations are using the tech for staffing, too, primarily to alleviate administrative burdens, retain top talent, and optimize workforce planning, per multiple discussions at ViVE 2025.
Accessibility and patient experience go hand in hand
As healthcare becomes increasingly interconnected, provider organizations must consider the accessibility of both traditional touchpoints and those in the digital space.
At the Carolinas Healthcare Public Relations and Marketing Society (CHPRMS) annual conference, experts highlighted the importance of digital accessibility at a time when millions of Americans are seeking healthcare online (and often encountering barriers to access in the process).
Sessions at CHPRMS 2025, HMPS, and ViVE explored the value of a welcoming digital front door—not only as a means of checking legal boxes, but more importantly as a streamlined pathway to care for new and current patients alike. Providers that can coordinate online scheduling, virtual visits, clinician compare tools, and patient education resources through a cohesive digital experience are better equipped to attract and retain patients, all while reducing workloads on patient-facing staff.
Patients’ perspectives on their digital and real-world care experiences can offer meaningful direction for improving accessibility. Plus, patients who are satisfied with their entire healthcare experience—from admission through discharge and aftercare—are more likely to comply with treatment, thus improving outcomes while reducing unnecessary emergency admissions. But many patients are more likely to share their experiences and perspectives with their peers than with their providers.
Healthcare organizations can use data and analytics to tune into some of these conversations. At our session at Pharma SOS, our data specialists outlined how to use natural language processing to analyze patient-generated content across digital platforms like blogs, videos, and forums and extract meaningful insights into patient concerns.
But accessibility isn’t just a focus for providers. At MAPS 2025, we learned how medical affairs teams have a role to play in improving access through awareness. As medical affairs partners closer with provider organizations, these teams have opportunities to close gaps in awareness, evidence, access, and quality of care by educating and supporting providers.
Cost of care remains a concern
At HLTH 2025, entrepreneur Mark Cuban led a discussion about the rising cost of care and prescription drugs. But it’s doubtful that anyone working in the industry needs a billionaire’s perspective to know that healthcare costs are a growing problem.
The need to do more with less budget was an underlying theme of sessions and conversations across nearly every conference we attended in 2025, but HLTH made it explicit: As high prices push patients away from care (or into debt), providers, payors, and life sciences companies have to work harder to connect with patients and improve care outcomes, even as their budgets shrink.
We heard more of these concerns at the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development’s (SHSMD) annual Connections conference—specifically, through the lens of healthcare marketing. Amid financial headwinds, marketing teams are finding themselves both under-budgeted and hindered in their ability to demonstrate their value to the C-suite.
When it comes to the question of combating costs, we (unfortunately) didn’t find a singular, comprehensive solution across any of the conferences we attended. We did, however, find that many companies are leveraging data to do more with less. Processes such as finding and engaging patients, identifying sales prospects, developing products, and prioritizing service lines for growth can all be enhanced at minimal cost with the right data and a little analytical know-how.
Cybersecurity deserves your full attention
With the number of healthcare data breaches continuing to rise annually, the subject of cybersecurity occupied prime real estate in multiple conferences’ programming schedules this year.
HIMSS 2025 even brought in U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone to share insights from his experience leading national cybersecurity efforts. Chief among them:
- Ransomware attacks against healthcare systems increased 15% worldwide over the prior year.
- Rural hospitals and clinics are especially vulnerable to these attacks.
- Clinicians need to be more tech-aware—and tech developers need to be more clinically minded—to protect against cyber threats.
Our own sales director, Mike Julian, discussed the relationship between data privacy, cybersecurity, and healthcare marketing at CHPRMS 2025 with leaders from Unlock Health, Ours Privacy, and Inspira Health. The joint session explored why the best practices for data privacy vary from organization to organization and how marketers can enrich first-party data to maintain security while boosting the impact of their work.
While AI is revolutionizing healthcare workflows, it’s also posing new security challenges. Several speakers at PMSA 2025 underscored AI-related risks to data privacy and the need for policy guardrails, rigorous validation models, and ongoing human oversight.
Across events, the leading voices in healthcare are making clear that cybersecurity isn’t just IT’s responsibility; it’s a matter of patient safety and quality of care.
Healthcare policy shakeups have the industry feeling uncertain
A year of government shutdowns, federal reorganizations, budget cuts, and policy shifts have the entire industry feeling a bit anxious. That anxiety was on clearest display at HLTH, SHSMD, and the BIO International Convention, where regulatory uncertainty was a topic of multiple discussions and learning sessions.
For example, as federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act have been allowed to expire, millions of Americans will lose access to affordable healthcare. Another 10 million are expected to lose Medicaid coverage over the next decade due to cuts introduced by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And more still will be unable to access telehealth services and hospital-at-home care, as Medicare waivers for these services expired in October.
Unsurprisingly, these policy shakeups are being felt in the life sciences, too. Biotech leaders at BIO International discussed how reduced federal funding, tariff-related supply chain cost hikes, and slowing FDA approvals are impacting business decisions, leading some companies to consider scaling back U.S. operations—or leaving the country entirely.
As broad cuts to clinical research grants take effect, institutions in Canada, Europe, and the U.K. are increasingly looking to attract U.S.-based medical and scientific experts. That could be good news for U.S. researchers interested in spending time abroad, but it likely spells trouble for an industry where retaining top talent is harder than ever.
Reliable data is more valuable than ever
Whether it’s powering AI tools, supporting staffing efforts, enabling better targeted and tailored engagement, or guiding product development, data has a place in every healthcare organization. It also had a place at every industry event we attended this year, either as a top-line agenda item or an undergirding element in discussions about the optimization of healthcare operations, care delivery, sales and marketing, cybersecurity, and other critical functions.
When Definitive Healthcare attends an event, our industry peers get an opportunity to explore our data and analytics solutions in person and see how data-driven insights make it easier to understand the people, organizations, facilities, and technologies at the heart of healthcare.
But you don’t even need to leave your desk to get see what’s next: Sign up today for a free, live demo, and we’ll show you how our data can help you get ahead in 2026.
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