The Top 26 Healthcare Trends of 2025

Estrogen therapy

After years of hesitation, estrogen therapy is making a quiet return. Once sidelined due to early-2000s studies linking it to health risks, it’s now being reexamined—particularly for its benefits during and after menopause.

Recent research has softened the narrative. While risks remain, newer data suggest that for many women—especially those under 60 or within 10 years of menopause onset—estrogen therapy may significantly improve quality of life. Relief from hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness is often immediate, and for some, it helps restore sleep and cognitive clarity.

That last point is driving renewed interest. Brain fog and mood swings are now widely recognized as core menopausal symptoms, not fringe experiences. Emerging studies link estrogen to cognitive maintenance, making it part of a broader conversation about aging and brain health.

There’s also a demographic force behind the shift: more women than ever are entering menopause. By 2030, the global population of postmenopausal women will exceed one billion. As demand rises, so does innovation. New delivery systems—like patches, gels, and low-dose formulations—are addressing earlier safety concerns and making treatment easier to adopt.

Estrogen therapy isn’t a blanket solution, but it reflects a growing shift in how menopause is understood—not as a decline to be endured, but a phase of life that can be managed with precision.

Rising healthcare demand

Healthcare systems around the world are entering a period of sustained pressure—not because of a sudden crisis, but because of overlapping long-term shifts.

First is demographics. In the U.S., adults over 65 now make up nearly 1 in 6 people, and that number is rising. Aging populations bring higher rates of conditions like arthritis, heart disease, and cognitive decline, all of which require consistent, often complex care.

Layered on top of that is chronic illness. Roughly 60% of U.S. adults live with at least one chronic condition. These aren’t short-term episodes—they’re ongoing needs, demanding continuous management through appointments, prescriptions, and monitoring.

Then there’s the aftermath of pandemic-era disruptions. Preventive care—cancer screenings, regular checkups, early diagnostics—was delayed or skipped for millions. That backlog is now re-entering the system, often with worsened conditions that require more urgent or intensive treatment.

Taken together, these forces are reshaping demand not only in volume but in type. Healthcare is no longer about acute, episodic care—it’s about sustained, coordinated support for aging, chronic, and recovering patients. Systems designed for short visits are being stretched by long-term needs, and for those building in the space, the challenge isn’t just scaling up—it’s adapting for endurance.

Ozempic and semaglutide

Originally developed to manage type 2 diabetes, Ozempic has rapidly gained traction as one of the largest health trends for something else: weight loss. Its active ingredient, semaglutide, mimics a gut hormone that regulates appetite—leading many users to report reduced hunger, fewer cravings, and sustained weight loss over time.

The results are notable. Clinical trials have shown that weekly semaglutide injections can lead to a 10–15% reduction in body weight, levels typically associated with bariatric surgery. That degree of effectiveness, paired with relatively low lifestyle disruption, has driven widespread adoption which mirrors the rise of Botox, one of the largest beauty trends, in becoming a quietly ubiquitous treatment.

What’s especially striking is the scale. An estimated 13% of U.S. adults have now used a GLP-1 drug like Ozempic, marking an unusually fast uptake for a prescription medication. In online forums, many users share that they’ve tried multiple diets with little long-term success—and see Ozempic as the first intervention that meaningfully curbed appetite and stabilized results.

While the long-term effects are still being studied, Ozempic’s rise reflects a shift in how weight management is approached—less about willpower, more about biology. It signals growing demand for medical tools that move beyond traditional advice and offer tangible, trackable outcomes.

Natural birth control

More women are turning to natural (i.e. non-hormonal) birth control, not as a rejection of medicine, but as a shift toward body literacy and side-effect avoidance.

For some, the appeal is straightforward: hormonal contraceptives, while effective, can come with side effects ranging from mood changes to migraines. As awareness of these trade-offs grows, so does interest in alternatives that don’t involve synthetic hormones.

Fertility awareness methods, once dismissed as unreliable, are being reexamined with the help of tech. Modern tracking apps now use temperature, cycle data, and algorithmic predictions to support natural methods with a level of convenience and consistency not previously available. While their effectiveness still depends on consistent use, they’ve made these options far more accessible to the average user.

Equally important is the growing desire for deeper knowledge of reproductive health. Many users report that tracking their cycle helps them better understand patterns in energy, mood, and physical symptoms—insights that go beyond contraception alone.

Natural birth control remains a small but growing category. Its rise points to a broader trend: more women seeking tools that help them understand and manage their health on their own terms.

Continuous glucose monitoring

Consumers today expect instant feedback in all areas of their life, including their health. Continuous glucose monitors are one example of how the medical industry is responding to this shift, offering a convenient way for the more than 38 million Americans with diabetes to monitor their health and becoming one of the top health care trends.

The wearable device allows users to track their glucose levels throughout the day and overnight without needing to prick their finger. As well, there’s typically a lag between a diabetic eating a meal and the subsequent effects, making it harder to implement behavioral changes and instant feedback drives far better outcomes. Better outcomes means happier users and more likely continued use.

Not only is the prediabetic US population growing (currently over 100 million), but biohackers are also keenly interested in the devices, and have pushed to find ways to get their hands on them through unofficial channels like eBay and overseas markets.

Glucose monitors are one of many wearable devices becoming more popular in health & wellness trends.

Fertility services

For the first time in history, more American women are having children in their thirties than in their twenties, a shift significantly affecting baby trends. The shift to later births is both a cause and effect of more women in the workforce, and it has increased demand for fertility-related services. 76,000 women froze their eggs in 2018, up a staggering 15x from 2013.

Companies like Kindbody partner with companies to offer healthcare benefits like in-vitro fertilization and egg freezing, a much-discussed benefit at big tech companies like Google and Facebook. Companies have two reasons for offering these benefits. Most clearly, benefits tend to be specifically appealing in a way that cash compensation is not: they invite someone to imagine a specific scenario where those benefits would make a difference in their lives. More cynically, since the cost of recruiting new employees is high, and since some people leave the workforce either temporarily or permanently after having kids, offering healthcare benefits that encourage having kids later can be a profitable choice.

Many HR leaders report that this is particularly impactful for companies that are trying to improve their diversity numbers and that fertility benefits give them both a way to attract more women and a way to reduce attrition, making fertility benefits one of the most important future healthcare trends to watch. Historically, egg freezing was primarily for women undergoing chemotherapy or radiation therapy but has since expanded into a way to have more control over when to have kids.

Wearable health devices

Smartwatches and other wearable devices—hallmarks of technology healthcare trends—are increasingly enabling people to self-monitor aspects of their health that were previously inaccessible or, at the very least, relegated to a doctor’s visit. Users track more critical health indicators like heart rate and blood sugar—metrics that can flag serious conditions such as heart attacks or strokes—alongside performance-oriented data like sleep quality, a growing focus in health & wellness trends.

Telemedicine and virtual care

The rise of telemedicine reflects growing demand for convenient, accessible healthcare, making it one of the defining current healthcare trends enabling remote consultations and expanding services to underserved areas.

Easy-to-hold products

Diagnoses of arthritis have increased 132.2% worldwide over the past 35 years and are predicted to continue growing through 2050. With increasing numbers of people losing hand dexterity and strength, ergonomic products across categories are seeing surges in demand — from electric screwdrivers, a top home improvement trend, to electric pepper grinders on the dinner table.

Considering the proportion of the global population aged 60 and over expected is to double by 2050, this trend will likely roll on for years to come.

Just-in-time staffing

The pandemic caused an unprecedented bifurcation in the healthcare industry. Elective procedures, where hospitals make most of their margin, were down, and emergency procedures were up. With spikes in demand for certain healthcare roles, alongside furloughs and layoffs for others, there began a growing dislocation in the healthcare job market that is increasingly well served by staffing agencies like connectRN, which focuses on temporary nursing jobs.

The spread of the virus in different areas at different rates also made just-in-time labor deployment more important than ever. And even after the pandemic, just-in-time labor is growing increasingly practical. Meanwhile, the number of medical operations available keeps rising as new technologies get invented and awareness of existing procedures grows.

Certain demographic trends are also particularly favorable for staffing agencies. Some towns age much faster than average, as young people leave, so their hospitals end up short-staffed even as demand rises. Every day, 10,000 Americans retire, and start spending less on nearly everything except healthcare where the average spend for the 75+ demographic is almost 2.5x that of the 45-54 demographic. These shifts will likely lead just-in-time staffing to continue as one of the most important emerging healthcare trends to watch.

In-home equipment

Every minute without defibrillator treatment after a cardiac arrest reduces a person’s chance of survival by 10%.

AEDs – which are battery-powered – benefit from the continuous improvements to cost and weight, essentially subsidized by the highly-funded arms race between companies in industries like phones, electric vehicles, and drones. The price per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion batteries has dropped by 97% since 1991 and as more products become battery-powered, scale drives further cost and weight decreases.

As these changing dynamics make home AEDs more realistic, they’ve become a key player in home healthcare trends, with a growing number of consumers taking matters into their own hands and buying the life-saving device.

As people continue to live longer, demand for home AEDs is likely to continue growing. The devices are also proving popular with people without health insurance, for whom the cost of an ambulance would be punishing.

Online patient portals

Patient portals—one of the fastest- growing digital healthcare trends—are online platforms where patients can check their medical records, usually after a doctors’ visit, though there’s some asymmetry in this growth.

The percent of healthcare providers who offer patient portals is growing quickly - nearly 90% as of this year. However, uptake on the consumer side has been more gradual.

Because the portal is used mostly after infrequent doctors' visits, like an annual checkup, engagement frequency is low so it's rare that logging in turns into a habit. As patient portals expand beyond infrequent doctors' visits and start to include more tools for visibility into daily health data, engagement may rise and usage may become more second.

A portion of consumers also avoid using the portals because they want to talk directly with their doctor. Stemming from a desire for comfort, this will start to change, as we've seen happen in the telemedicine industry where consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with virtual visits to the doctor.