Writing Healthcare’s Next Chapter at HLTH 2025

As HLTH enters our 8th year, we can’t help but feel a little nostalgic for the past. Ahh simpler times! Over the years, we’ve been through a lot together: the emergence of virtual care, many of big tech’s forays into healthcare, a global pandemic, a digital health funding frenzy, a digital health funding drought, several breakthrough therapy and blockbuster drug launches, a Trump presidency, a Biden presidency, yet another Trump presidency, an ongoing AI real-world transformation and now, a looming economic recession. And that’s just scratching the surface. It’s been an eventful 8 years in healthcare and so far, the 2025 news cycle has been as active as ever.

On reflection of the ups and downs throughout the history of health innovation, HLTH has emerged as the central platform for the industry’s top movers and shakers to gather in order to take us to the next inflection point, the next chapter of our story. HLTH is where we turn the page and set our sights forward. We’ve seen this through major announcements across our stages, product reveals on the show floor, impactful storytelling across the program, deal after deal getting done, and ample social media chatter around these epic 4 days each October in Las Vegas.

In 2025, we are once again gathering the heroes and legends across the industry to further define our ethos as we continue on this grand journey to transform healthcare. We are taking a nod from Ancient Greece and celebrating big, bold thinkers, who were deemed crazy at the time, but their willingness to step outside the box of conventional wisdom cemented their names in the history books.  

Our event theme “Heroes & Legends” is meant to evoke a sense of purpose and passion in the area you’re building with a goal to change the course of health’s history for the better. We are living through extremely uncertain times with a turbulent economic and political environment that has a direct impact on the patients we serve and businesses we manage. It’s imperative we come together to navigate the current climate as a unified force and ensure the strong ethos of our industry is not rattled by external factors. A true hero’s journey!

So what's in store for 2025? Let's walk through the topics coming to our stages at HLTH. You know we have a flair for the dramatic, so just stay with us here. 

Every Greek hero has a strong ethos that guides them in all life’s decisions. While the ethos of our country seems starkly divided right now, we feel healthcare can be an area where we come together on a shared mission: to fundamentally improve the health experience and outcomes for all through the use of technology, community and partnership. We’ll explore history-defining topics like implementing agentic AI that truly transforms clinical workflows while respecting physician autonomy, pioneering value-based payment models, developing systematic approaches to combat health misinformation, establishing sustainable funding mechanisms for women's health research that address historically neglected conditions, implementing community-based solutions that measurably close care gaps for rural and urban underserved populations, and accelerating breakthrough therapeutics in rare diseases, oncology, and neurodegenerative conditions. Our Ethos Stage will tackle these big, industry-wide challenges to help further fine tune our guiding principles as health leaders. 

We won’t pretend there won’t be any friction on stage — frankly, we love a little friction so we're embracing it! We challenge our speakers to act with kairos and confidently defend their opinion where they have the evidence and experience to back it up. We should be challenging each other constructively, engaging in difficult conversations, celebrating each other's victories and competing with respect. On our stages, we’ll ask the questions everyone is thinking and encourage our speakers to say the quiet part out loud. Let’s move beyond the buzzwords and express our authentic beliefs, as meaningful change can only emerge from honest dialogue. 

Our Kairos Stage will be home to hard-hitting conversations around building metrics that conclusively demonstrate AI's ROI beyond marketing hype, creating playbooks for navigating the complex 'frenemy' relationships between startups competing in the same categories, redesigning the antiquated reimbursement and claims infrastructure that costs billions in administrative waste annually, developing equitable cancer care delivery models that eliminate the 20% survival gap between socioeconomic groups, expanding reproductive health access through innovative telehealth and community-based care models, preparing organizations to thrive amid seismic health policy shifts while minimizing workforce disruption, and examining the promises and pitfalls of the rapidly expanding D2C medicine movement.  

This chapter in health will undoubtedly include a greater focus on whole health and preventive measures, driven by consumers, embraced by innovators and supported by many incumbents. Looking at the entirety of a person’s health, their “holos,” rather than checking off each episodic care box at a time is crucial to changing our trend towards living longer, but in less healthy years. 

Our Holos Stage will dive into topics including leveraging AI-driven predictive analytics that proactively identify disease risks, scaling personalized digital nutrition platforms, integrating wearable data streams into EHRs with actionable clinical decision support, democratizing evidence-based longevity science beyond the wealthy through consumer-accessible interventions, mapping the gut-brain communication pathways, monitoring and reducing environmental toxins quietly plaguing our health, uncovering the interconnected ecosystem of human microbiomes, and addressing the $400+ billion economic impact of sleep deprivation. And as expected from HLTH, we’ll pose a few existential questions like “can we tech our way to happiness?” Our Holos Stage, surrounded by a new wellness experience, won’t be one to miss.

Ok, we are definitely above the word count the marketing team has asked to stay within, so below is a rundown of our other main agenda stages hitting the show this year. 

Logos Stage: Associated with reason, knowledge and logic, we can use our logos to connect with a higher meaning and make a little more sense of life’s chaos. Sounds lovely, but in an industry as chaotic as healthcare, specifically employer-sponsored health, we’ll need all the knowledge and resources we can get to control the ballooning cost of care within this primary source of health coverage for Americans. The Logos Stage will dive very deep into the main challenges facing employers big and small, including evaluating the real-world impact of ICHRAs on employee health outcomes and employer costs, designing next-generation care management systems that reduce clinical variation and unnecessary utilization, building employer-sponsored primary care models with true preventive capabilities, and implementing unified benefit data architectures that eliminate the data silos preventing truly personalized employee health journeys. 

Pharmos Stage: So we admit, we made the word “pharmos” up, but it’s catchy right? The Pharmos Stage and accompanying lounge will be your one-stop shop for all things pharma and life sciences at HLTH. Top executives from big pharma, biotech, genomics, laboratory and tech will take the stage to walk us through accelerating drug development through platforms that reduce discovery-to-market timelines by years, revolutionizing clinical trials with AI-enhanced patient selection and real-time protocol adaptation, building comprehensive digital twin technologies that simulate individual responses to therapies before administration, programming cellular behavior through advanced genetic editing technologies, developing sustainable pricing models that balance innovation incentives with accessibility imperatives, and creating pathways for productive engagement with FDA regulatory frameworks that enhance rather than impede innovation. 

Plutus Stage: Like the Greek God of wealth, Plutus, this stage will focus on all things dollars and cents when it comes to funding health innovations. Investors and founders will cover topics like the post-correction funding landscape, analyzing how "zombie unicorns" with unsustainable valuations can pivot toward profitability or prepare for graceful consolidation, and mapping sustainable growth trajectories in a capital-constrained environment. We'll showcase founders who've weathered down rounds and emerged stronger, sharing tactical playbooks for restructuring operations, retaining top talent, and maintaining stakeholder confidence through financial turbulence. We’ll also put a spotlight on bolstering founder mental health, look into an IPO crystal ball to forecast paths to liquidity, and candidly check in with LPs as they are recalibrating their healthcare investment theses amid shifting macroeconomic conditions. 

Eros Stage: Eros embodies love and passion, so on this stage expect to hear from impassioned founders, policy leaders, advocates, and operators who will not accept the status quo in delivering quality healthcare. Eros will host a series of intimate speaker Q&As, several living room conversations (our spin on a fireside chat,) a pitch competition or two, and more discussions that stray from the norm. Topics will vary, but you will feel the love for health innovation throughout!

On the Sunday of HLTH, you can expect action on the Ethos, Logos and Eros Stages where we will theme our sessions in three major categories:

Will you become the heroes and legends of this new era in health innovation? We invite you to apply to speak and find out. 

We should also note that our main stage, Mount Olympus Stage, will host the biggest CEOs, celebrities, tech leaders, government officials, health luminaries and the like. I mean last year we had Lenny Kravitz AND Jill Biden so trust us. If you or a client falls in this category, email us directly rather than applying. (Oprah, call us!)

Join us in writing healthcare’s next chapter!