The healthcare industry is facing challenges on all fronts, from staffing shortages and regulatory changes to mergers and acquisitions and patient care.
As fundamental as these issues are, healthcare providers are also dealing with critical IT concerns such as cybersecurity, data management, and digitalization that affect all of those issues.
In this article, we’ll explore six of the top IT trends and concerns facing the healthcare industry in 2025.
We’ll also outline how managed IT services can help small and medium-sized healthcare organizations like yours harness your technology to meet those challenges head-on and fuel a digital transformation for future growth.
With this information, you’ll discover how managed IT services can help improve efficiency, boost security, lower costs, and propel your business.
Like other industries, the healthcare industry today is grappling with the best ways to effectively leverage the seemingly endless possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI).
Healthcare organizations are looking to integrate generative AI solutions to streamline workflow, optimize resources, save money, and improve the overall patient experience.
With the use of artificial intelligence expected to explode in the coming years, the care patients receive in a doctor’s office, hospital, rehabilitation center, urgent care clinic, nursing home, independent living facility, or other healthcare facility, may look very different from what it looks like today.
AI is being used as a virtual assistant to automate certain time-consuming and repetitive tasks, such as appointment scheduling, billing, and patient record management. It’s also being used for predictive diagnosis, to enhance minimally invasive surgical procedures, and provide analysis to improve treatment and recovery.
These and other trends in AI adoption within the healthcare industry come amid tightening regulations around data privacy and cybersecurity to safeguard patient medical records and sensitive personal information.
So, healthcare businesses will need to balance responsibly using AI-driven technologies to harness its benefits with establishing appropriate guardrails to protect their data against cyber threats.
Cybersecurity remains a top IT concern for healthcare organizations in 2025. The industry continues to be a prime target of threat actors because of the vast amounts of personal information they store, process, and transmit.
This means that businesses competing in this field need to stay vigilant about monitoring their networks for suspicious activity and locking down their perimeter with advanced security solutions to mitigate risks—including human risks.
Social engineering attacks, such as phishing schemes, exploit human emotions like fear, trust, and curiosity to trick individuals into clicking on an infected link or downloading a malicious file to gain unauthorized access.
Once inside, they can launch a cyberattack such as malware, ransomware, or a data breach.
Such incidents can cause lasting harm to you, your employees, patients, and partners, including identity theft, reputational damage, financial losses, and even possible regulatory compliance and legal repercussions.
In addition, cyber incidents can disrupt critical healthcare services and negatively impact the quality and efficiency of patient care.
In another IT trend related to healthcare cybersecurity, third-party healthcare service provider and supplier attacks are on the rise, with implications that go far beyond financial damage or even data loss, according to a report by the American Hospital Association.
For instance, the February 2024 cyberattack on United HealthGroup’s subsidiary Change Healthcare reverberated across the country. The subsidiary is responsible for patient care and coverage authorization, claims processing, and prescription drug processing.
In that ransomware attack, the protected health information of an estimated 190 million individuals was compromised. The compromised data included: names, social security numbers, dates of birth, and medical records.
In addition to the massive data breach, the attack potentially endangered lives, causing delays in patient care and access to vital health care services, among other significant processing and data access problems that resulted from the Change Healthcare cyberattack.
According to published reports, the data breach represented the single largest healthcare cyber incident ever reported, impacting hospitals, care facilities, pharmacies, private practices, and other healthcare organizations across the country.
The company is still dealing with legal fallout from the incident.
Given the aftershocks still being felt from this and other recent cyber incidents, along with constantly changing regulatory and cybersecurity liability insurance requirements, healthcare organizations are putting greater focus on security in 2025.
According to the recently released survey findings of the nonprofit Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), more than half of respondents (52 percent) said their organizations were ramping up cybersecurity spending.
In its 2024 HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey report, 57 percent of healthcare cybersecurity professionals said they're integrating more security resources, including AI, to boost their security posture.
In today’s tech-driven landscape, everything is connected.
Much of this interconnectedness is being driven by the increasing prevalence of internet of things (IoT) devices in healthcare.
Common examples of IoT devices include laptops, tablets, smartphones, and smartwatches.
In a healthcare setting, they can also include wearable patient monitoring devices, glucose monitors, heart implants, smart CT and MRI scanners, patient vital signs monitors, and even smart beds, among many others.
While the growing acceptance and use of IoT devices provides many conveniences, they’re also yet another source of potential vulnerability within your environment.
Healthcare organizations are tasked with unifying scattered medical information—such as patient providers, diagnoses, treatments, and prescriptions—under a centralized system.
These organizations also generate vast amounts of data each day, including electronic health records (EHRs), medical imaging, and personal data.
As a result, healthcare organizations of all sizes are trying to figure out where to store all of this data and ensure its security and integrity.
According to survey results published by global investment bank RBC Capital Markets, the healthcare industry is the source of about 30 percent of the world’s data today.
What’s more, the annual growth rate of data for healthcare is project to hit 36 percent by this year— a faster growth rate than manufacturing, financial services, and media & entertainment, according to the report.
Lack of comprehensive data storage and backup solutions can also open the door for malicious actors to exploit weaknesses within your infrastructure.
Organizations also need to ensure they stay on top of ever-changing data privacy and security compliance requirements like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
Many businesses within the healthcare industry are struggling with a host of ongoing technology challenges, bogged down by outdated software and hardware and inefficient processes.
These problems can lead to costly delays and critical mistakes, including possible data loss.
Issues like network misconfigurations, insufficient bandwidth, connectivity issues, repeated downtime, and a lack of access to IT professional expertise can cause significant problems if healthcare organizations can't readily access the information they need.
Even as healthcare organizations say they’re spending more money on cybersecurity, according to the HIMSS survey, they also concede that recruiting and retaining qualified cybersecurity professionals is an ongoing challenge.
A combination of talent shortages, intense competition for IT pros across other industries, employee burnout, and a skills gap created by rapid technology advances, have led to a significant IT and cybersecurity personnel crunch among healthcare organizations.
This means that many healthcare organizations lack the internal IT resources to ensure the ongoing safety of their systems and data.
Given the recent advances in technology and challenges it brings, many small and medium-sized healthcare organizations are turning to managed IT service providers (MSPs) for help.
With managed IT, you instantly gain an entire team of IT professionals with specialized skills and broad industry knowledge to implement strong security controls and advanced IT solutions to both protect your valuable data and solve your IT headaches.
Managed IT can also help you leverage your technology to improve productivity, streamline operations, and lower costs.
Like businesses in other industries, healthcare organizations are realizing the intrinsic value of managed IT services to improve and grow their businesses without the substantial investment of putting together an in-house IT team.
After reading this article, you now understand the top IT challenges facing the healthcare industry and how managed IT can help you meet those challenges.
Rapidly evolving technology advances are presenting both opportunities and challenges for many healthcare organizations.
So, how do you best position your business for the road ahead?
If you’re a healthcare organization in need of flexible IT solutions to allow you to strengthen your cybersecurity defenses, ensure regulatory compliance, improve operations, and give you a competitive advantage, then managed IT could be the answer.
If you have a small internal team of IT professionals—or none at all—you may be searching for the right MSP for your business. If so, we encourage you to check out several local providers before deciding on one.
Curious about how much managed IT will cost your business? Use or calculator for an instant, no-obligation estimate.
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