2025 Predictions: Going Places Together—with a Shared Purpose

Frank Harvey, Chief Executive Officer, Surescripts

Collaboration—with a shared purpose—has been the constant force behind our ability at Surescripts to serve the nation with simpler, trusted health intelligence sharing. Collaboration has driven us for the past two decades, and it will continue to drive us in the year to come.

In 2025, collaboration will help healthcare heal itself. Collaboration will help to streamline the benefits process. It will reduce clinician burnout. It will help prescribers more efficiently deliver affordable medications to patients. And it will support the role of pharmacists as part of an evolving care team—all while increasing patient safety, lowering costs and ensuring quality care for patients across the country.

• Key takeaway: In 2025, the story of healthcare can be one of success, optimism and collaboration.

Tara Dragert, Chief Product Officer, Surescripts

Clinicians, pharmacies and health plans face heavy administrative burdens, and in 2025, we will continue collaborating with stakeholders from across the industry to advance interoperability and innovations that can meaningfully reduce the time spent sending faxes and making phone calls.

We will build on the progress we’ve made in simplifying the process for medication prior authorizations by enabling more care providers with trusted intelligence on benefits and authorizations within their existing workflows. This will ensure that patients get high-quality, affordable care sooner, have a better experience and improved care quality.

And in 2025 we’ll continue to work alongside Surescripts Network Alliance participants to innovate as we continue making an impact, improving patient care, together.

• Key takeaway: Learn more about innovating for impact with the expansion of Sig IQ technology to E-Prescribing, for a more accurate, safer and efficient process for prescribers and pharmacists—from the start.

Mark Gingrich, Chief Information Officer, Surescripts

It’s a safe bet to say that we’ll continue to see lots of hype around AI in 2025. That much is certain. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the more substantial clinical uses of AI are still a few years out. That said, though, we’ll start seeing real possibilities emerge for the use of AI in healthcare—a more practical application of AI geared toward operational and administrative tasks, particularly those that streamline processes.

• Key takeaway: We used AI to parse text Sigs that informed the machine learning techniques we built into our Sig IQ feature for Medication History, which augmented more than 2 million RxRenewal transactions in the first 6 months alone following its release in late 2023.

Melanie Marcus, Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer, Surescripts

Collaboration. Collaboration. Collaboration. I can’t stress that enough. Working together with a shared purpose, with all participants of the Surescripts Network Alliance, will continue to drive meaningful innovation to expand health intelligence sharing in 2025. This will advance interoperability and enable support for value-based care across the industry—from care teams at health systems and pharmacies to care managers at health plans.

• Key takeaway: Collaboration to expand health intelligence sharing has brought enhanced visibility into patient medication histories for health plans.

Andrew Mellin, M.D., Vice President & Chief Medical Information Officer, Surescripts

As a physician myself, clinician burnout is often on my mind. This issue will unfortunately persist in 2025. The many hassles of prior authorization are a leading factor in burnout—but innovation will streamline and automate the process. The benefits process will also be streamlined, and for payers, it’ll be possible to manage coverage and cost structures to optimize patient access to medications.

• Key takeaway: This case study illustrates how prior authorization automation improved the provider experience with an 88% reduction in appeals and a 68% reduction in denials.

Lynne Nowak, M.D., Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Surescripts

It’s all about AI these days, right? But I think we’ll really start to see advances that go beyond the hype and start to have measurable impact on healthcare in 2025. When it comes to AI, the real measure of success hinges on trust—trust that, ultimately, patient care and care quality won’t be put at risk. As AI continues to advance next year, I think we’ll see executives and leaders take important steps to enhance privacy and security around AI’s use in healthcare, to ensure transparency and accountability.

• Key takeaway: Both now and in the future, the responsible use of AI will require ethical use, privacy and security, transparency, and accountability. See our AI commitment for more.

Judy Hatchett, Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer, Surescripts

2025 will likely be a big year for cybersecurity—just as it has been for the past five years. The “threat landscape” is constantly changing. Ransomware, phishing and social engineering are three key areas of focus across the industry, along with fraudulent prescribing.

Surescripts helps combat fraudulent prescribing by enforcing strong identity proofing requirements, systematically investigating potential cases of fraud, and convening the Network Alliance to tackle the issue through cross-industry collaboration and sharing best practices.

In 2025, I predict that our partnership with CLEAR will increase efficiency and provide a more automated and simplified experience for providers and healthcare organizations by adding yet another layer of identity validation protections.

• Key takeaway: Our partnership with CLEAR will support Surescripts Network Alliance participants—including providers, pharmacies and payers—by streamlining validation and ongoing identity verification.

Meg Murphy, Manager, Pharmacy & Regulatory Affairs, Surescripts

We expect state level policies will continue to evolve so that pharmacists can provide more care to patients in a way that’s aligned with their education and training. And this is a step in the right direction. But we might also see an even broader, truly comprehensive shift in policy that recognizes and reimburses pharmacists for the care they provide. We expect to see the industry collaborate in new ways to align technology with how care is delivered today. This is how we'll help healthcare heal itself in 2025.

• Key takeaway: Our joint initiative with The Sequoia Project takes pharmacy interoperability center stage.