The Intersection of Health, Tech and Purpose: What I’m Most Excited to See at HLTH 2025

HLTH has long been one of my favorite annual gatherings, as a physician and journalist with a passion for health innovation. After years of attending, speaking and moderating panels there, it remains a touchstone for understanding where healthcare is headed. This year, HLTH USA is marking its 8th edition under the banner “Heroes & Legends,” and I’m especially eager to explore what that means in practice.

Here are the five themes I’m most looking forward to at this year’s HLTH in Las Vegas:

The value of AI beyond the hype
Artificial intelligence isn’t new at HLTH, but in 2025, the conversation is shifting from speculative promise to measurable impact. Many sessions now center on deployment, return-on-investment, guardrails and regulatory alignment.

I’m curious about agentic AI, tools that empower healthcare systems to automate complex tasks and workflows. Because these systems can act independently and make decisions that affect patient care, they raise important questions about accountability, bias, and oversight. That fits squarely into HLTH’s framing of moral purpose in health innovation. 

Given that leaders from big tech and major health systems are on the speaker roster, I expect robust debates about commercialization, safety, regulation and trust.

The long game of prevention
If we’re going to bend the cost curve, we need to stop treating disease as the default. HLTH’s emphasis on longevity, nutrition and wellness practices promises a deep dive into upstream strategies.

I want to see how new models for personalized prevention are being pitched as scalable and not just boutique pilots. Can AI-augmented risk stratification and early intervention meaningfully reduce hospitalizations or chronic disease onset? Also, what should we all know about the gut-brain axis and sleep science?

Funding and fiscal resilience
Healthcare innovation depends on robust capital investment. This year’s programming is explicitly focused on investment climate, IPO trends and investor sentiment. Founders are given lots of airtime, and there is even a session on “zombie unicorns”. 

I’ll be intently following sessions on how innovators survive downward corrections. Which business models and funding strategies will carry forward? How will founders balance ambition with sustainability? And how will the investor community recalibrate expectations in today’s challenging fiscal climate?

Deep innovation in women’s health and metabolic disease
I appreciate the focus HLTH is devoting to women’s health, from health throughout and beyond the reproductive years to cancer detection to longevity. I’m keen to explore how new research, AI and direct-to-consumer models can converge to address gaps in research and care.

On the metabolic disease front, GLP-1s and cardiometabolic innovation will feature heavily in Sunday sessions. I’ll actually be moderating one of these sessions myself, on whether GLP-1 medications are the new wonder drugs that can extend healthspan and lifespan. Another of my Sunday sessions is on why young women are being diagnosed with more cancers. Come join us!

Breakthroughs in rare diseases, oncology and precision science
These are areas where high risk could meet high reward. I’ll be following the panels on accelerated drug discovery via AI and innovative trial designs, and I want to see the future that’s envisioned as well as what outcomes have already been realized. 

Behind every breakthrough are patients waiting for treatments that often feel just out of reach. I’m curious how innovators are shortening that gap between discovery and access. And I’ll be watching for intersections—where AI meets payers to accelerate coverage decisions, where longevity science informs clinical innovation, and where partnerships make specialized care more accessible.

HLTH 2025 feels like a turning point, a moment when hype gives way to practice, when innovation must square with system challenges and when the human element is on center stage. When I am not hosting HLTH’s The Beat Executive Video Series or moderating panels, I plan to go to sessions, engage in the hard questions and come away with sharper insight.