Aaron Strout: 2025 Healthcare Predictions and the Fight Against Misinformation

Aaron Strout, Chief Marketing Officer at Real Chemistry, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“2025 is set to transform healthcare with AI-driven personalization, authentic patient stories, and proactive preventive care. These innovations will enhance patient engagement, rebuild trust, and combat misinformation, ensuring equitable access and improved health outcomes for all.

Check out these predictions and more from these hand-picked experts.

Navigating the Future: 2025 Healthcare Predictions and the Fight Against Misinformation

As we look ahead to 2025, the healthcare industry is poised for a transformative year, with a strong emphasis on authenticity, real-world experiences, and patient-centric approaches. Industry leaders predict that AI and data-driven strategies will revolutionize patient interactions, making care more personalized and efficient. These technologies will enhance marketing efforts and provide real-time support, particularly in managing complex conditions like cancer. However, the industry must also confront significant challenges, including the spread of misinformation, declining trust, and media fragmentation.

Despite these hurdles, there are promising opportunities. Preventive care campaigns will become more proactive and inclusive, and live events will play a crucial role in building deeper connections. By focusing on real patient stories and equitable access, healthcare brands can rebuild trust and ensure that all communities receive the care they need.

To help better understand the landscape, I asked some of my smartest friends in the industry to share their predictions regarding healthcare marketing, media and advertising. I gave them a wide berth, so some are broader than others. I provided 25-30 words as a guideline, but some went a bit further, which I was 100% okay with.

Shawna Butler, RN MBA – Nurse Economist; Host of See You Now podcast

Predictions for health advertising, marketing and media in 2025:

• Authenticity and Relatable: Health media will favor realistic patient stories over aspirational ones.
• Real-world settings: Ads will move from staged to raw(er) environments.
• Been There. Done That.: Lived and peer experience will gain footing with expert opinions in marketing and advertising.
• Immersive storytelling: Marketing using immersive RPG formats will increase audience participation.
• Destigmatization: Greater ease and sensitivity in sharing stories of stigmatized conditions and communities.

Wendy Carhart – Chief Communications, Culture and Purpose Officer, Real Chemistry

2025 is shaping up to be the year to stay flexible, double-down on your organization’s unique mission and vision and focus on your most important stakeholders. These are keys to success in fluid environments.

Jason Crites – Founder, CEO and Chief Data Officer, Assurance Health Data

Healthcare marketing in 2025 will focus on hyper-personalized, data-driven strategies, leveraging AI and privacy-first, trust-based platforms and network-driven approaches to foster patient trust, drive engagement, deliver measurable outcomes, and improve health for millions globally.

Larry Dobrow – former Editor-In-Chief, MM+M; Co-editor Kinara; Founding Partner, D4 Content Group

In 2025 we’ll see the continuation and expansion of a trend that started to bubble to the surface at the end of 2024: Smarter and more involved preventive care campaigns. By prioritizing proactive health management over reactive treatment, these efforts have a better chance of resonating with consumers exhausted by the constant barrage of brand communication. It’s the ideal time to deliver broad-based wellness messaging.

Barry Edelman, Head of Global Marketing, HLTH Inc.

In 2025, AI will take healthcare marketing to the next level, with predictive analytics and generative tools redefining patient engagement. Meanwhile, GLP-1 innovations will push pharma to double down on retention and strategic partnerships to stay competitive.

Hugh Forrest – President and Chief Programming Officer, SXSW

Media will continue to fragment along ideological lines in 2025. This particularly on the social media side of the fence, with more left-leaning users embracing Bluesky as they abandon other platforms.

Ellen Gerstein – Senior Director, Content Strategy and Digital Communications, Corporate Affairs, Pfizer

I predict AI will become increasingly integrated into the tools and platforms used by communicators. They will avail themselves of these time and money-saving tools, while at the same time training them to generate more human-like outputs to sound more natural and conversational.

Shwen Gwee – Founder and Host, #GenAI4Pharma

In 2025, pharma marketers will begin to fully integrate Generative AI tools into their marketing strategies and workflows. These tools will augment campaign optimization, enhance content and creative generation, and drive more personalized customer engagement/support through AI agents. AI will enable marketers to work more efficiently, creating tailored, data-driven campaigns while maintaining compliance and adhering to industry regulations.

Chuck Hemann – Chief Integration Officer, Minds + Assembly

Many marketers are likely prioritizing omnichannel strategies and hyper-targeting specific audiences. However, this year, we will recognize that integrating creativity, media, and analytics is vital for effectively supporting patients and physicians.

Erica Jefferson – SVP Corporate Affairs, Recode Therapeutics; former Associate Commissioner, Officer of External Affairs, FDA

With the political uncertainty and inevitable changes expected in U.S. health policy and regulation, I think the need for a measured communication strategy to respond to these changes that emphasizes the importance of innovation and patient care will be more important than ever.

Peter Kane – VP of Growth Marketing, Swoop

Data, AI, privacy, and personalization: 2025 will be a year of convergence. Agentic technologies allow marketers to better understand and act on their fractured data. Health-literate consumers demand more nuance to the advertising they experience. All while the industry navigates an increasingly complex and fractured privacy landscape.

Maimah Karmo – President and CEO, Tigerlilly Foundation

In 2025, leaders across healthcare have the opportunity to keep their commitment to communities that are facing disparities in healthcare – and keep the promises and proclamations they made to Black, Brown and other vulnerable populations in 2020.

As a leader in women’s healthcare and oncology arena, while it gave me so much hope to see all the investments being made after the murder of George Floyd and the COVID pandemic, it has been with dismay, shock and sadness that the progress we saw being made is being dismantled.

2025 will present people with the opportunity to be true leaders and speak up about what we know has to continue – ensuring that people have the healthcare access and medicines that work best for them, ensuring that basic human rights are protected and that people feel safe to be who they are.

2025 will present people with opportunities to be brave and stand up for what is just and right for people in need.  2025, I pray, will be an opportunity for us to, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, remember that “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

Karen Knudsen, MBA PhD – former CEO, American Cancer Society and American Cancer Society Action Network; Endowed Professor, Thomas Jefferson University

In 2025, AI will be leveraged to enhance healthcare communications by providing more personalized patient interactions and real-time support. This entry point will set the stage for increasingly efficient care coordination and reduced administrative burden for caregivers, leading to a more streamlined and responsive healthcare experience over time. I am bullish about the use of AI to not only improve experience but to improve outcomes, even for complex diseases like cancer.  Let’s get started!

Angus MacCaulay – Chief Operating Officer, STAT News

The future of health care media and marketing will be marked by challenges such as misinformation and the decline of fact-checking. However, brands that prioritize credible reporting and trustworthy content will thrive. Live events will play a vital role in building connections, and scientific advancements will drive significant progress in the industry.

Dr. Geeta Nayar, MD, MBA – author of WSJ and USA Today’s best seller, Dead Wrong; Chief Medical Officer, RadiantGraph

A perfect storm of healthcare misinformation is here. It is connected to healthcare’s greatest challenges, including eroding trust, lagging outcomes, and ever-increasing costs. I remain hopeful that healthcare will embrace its responsibility to confront this in 2025.

Jack O’Brien – Managing Editor, MM+M

What to expect in healthcare marketing, advertising and media this year: More people leave the new Omnicom to land at indie medical marketing agencies, experimentation with AI continues in practical ways for campaigns and RFK Jr.’s TV ad ban gets the kibosh

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn – Health Economist, advisor, trend weaver, global educator

As patients continue to take on more clinical and financial responsibility for their care, they will seek value on their own terms, coupled with omni-channel convenience, well-designed digital on-ramps, and trustworthy information. Re-building trust and access will be Job one for health media touchpoints.

Mary Stutts, CEO, Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA)

In the 2025 environment of amplified scrutiny, healthcare advertising, media and marketing will have to tell more compelling, data-driven stories about the impact of their products, campaigns and company on all stakeholders.

Jim Weiss, Founder and Chairman, Real Chemistry; executive advisor, New Mountain Capital

This year, there will be greater and greater focus on the empowerment of people. My advice — especially for women – is to put your mask on first before taking care of others because if you don’t take care of yourself, the system won’t take care of you. Better to prevent the event – through diagnostics, genomic testing – than to have to treat it. The sooner you know your health profile, the more empowered, proactive and impactful you can be.

Hopefully you feel smarter after having read these predictions. Feel free to share yours in the comments if you like. And if it’s really good, I may just ask if I can add it to the article!”