2025 Year in Review: Turning Connected Data Into Better Care
How interoperability, value-based care adoption, and population health strategies transformed U.S. healthcare this year — backed by emerging data and industry research
As 2025 comes to a close, one truth has become undeniable: organizations that invested in connected, clean, real-time data outperformed their peers across clinical, operational, and financial outcomes.
Throughout the year, Opala supported payer and provider partners as they transformed their data capabilities and care models. Specifically, Opala helped organizations:
- Build trusted, normalized longitudinal patient records
- Integrate real-time clinical event notifications into workflows
- Improve value-based care performance through cleaner, more complete data
- Strengthen population health insights with enriched context and multi-source intelligence
As the evidence from this year shows, healthcare can only advance at the pace of its data. In 2025, Opala helped accelerate that pace. At Opala, these trends reflect exactly what we have built toward: data that moves freely, arrives cleanly, and becomes actionable at the moment it’s needed.
Without further ado, let’s examine the evidence and industry forces that shaped healthcare in 2025.
Theme #1: Interoperability Became the Operating System for Modern Healthcare
This year, interoperability transitioned from a regulatory obligation to a strategic differentiator.
Standards matured — and implementation followed
According to Firely’s 2025 analysis, widespread FHIR adoption across payers, providers, and digital health systems demonstrates a decisive shift from pilot projects to operational use cases. Organizations are no longer experimenting; they are building infrastructure around standardized data exchange.
Several industry studies this year underscored the shift. Firely’s State of FHIR in 2025 report found that 71% of organizations are now using FHIR in active production workflows, up from 66% the year prior — a clear indication that standards-based exchange has matured to mainstream adoption.
Real-time event data became essential to coordinated care
KLAS reported that health systems increasingly depend on real-time clinical data, such as ADT feeds and care-transition alerts, to power value-based care workflows. This shift helped organizations intervene earlier, reduce avoidable utilization, and coordinate care more effectively.
Meanwhile, the KLAS Digital Health Most Wired National Trends 2025 report observed that healthcare has become “more dependent than ever on real-time and predictive information, interoperability, and the safe adoption of AI.” Interoperability is no longer a compliance requirement; it is the operating fabric of modern healthcare.
Longitudinal data proved its value through measurable outcomes
Multiple 2025 studies highlighted the power of enriched longitudinal records. A new SDoH dataset published in early 2025 demonstrated that integrating environmental and social context with clinical and claims data produces stronger correlations with utilization, outcomes, and even life expectancy than older approaches to population risk stratification. This research solidified what many value-based organizations already suspected: disconnected snapshots can no longer support the demands of modern care models.
Theme #2: Value-Based Care Accelerated — Driven by Cost Pressure and Enabled by Better Data
The macroeconomic environment pushed value-based care forward faster than at any point in the last decade.
According to Definitive Healthcare’s Rising Healthcare Costs analysis, medical care prices rose 4.3% year-over-year in July 2025, far outpacing general inflation. At the same time, the American Hospital Association’s April 2025 Cost of Caring report showed that labor expenses, acuity levels, and chronic disease burden continue to strain health systems.
These pressures made it clear: fee-for-service is too costly and too inefficient to sustain long-term.
UnitedHealth Group’s 2025 Value-Based Care outlook echoed this sentiment, reinforcing that tying payments to quality, coordination, and outcomes is one of the most reliable levers available to improve performance and reduce waste.
With this backdrop, value-based care programs in 2025 experienced meaningful shifts with more precise risk models, real-time insights driving operational gains, and a renewed focus on costs.
More precise risk models
Research from 2025 introduced a modernized “balanced ADI” (bADI) social risk index that showed stronger predictive power for health outcomes and spending than legacy indices. When connected to longitudinal clinical data, these enhanced models allowed more accurate identification of rising-risk individuals.
Operational gains tied directly to real-time insights
Organizations that integrated real-time clinical notifications saw faster outreach, better care transitions, and earlier interventions. This improvement validated the findings from KLAS that real-time data has become a foundational requirement for modern care delivery.
A renewed focus on spend management
With medical inflation and specialty drug costs increasing, many plans prioritized site-of-care optimization, early chronic disease management, and medication adherence — all strategies that rely heavily on integrated, timely data.
Theme #3: Population Health Management Evolved Into Precision Population Health
2025 marked the year population health initiatives became notably more intelligent and actionable.
Whole-person, longitudinal insight became the standard
Studies published in 2025 — including a new SDoH-EHR linkage tool and exposome database — demonstrated that adding social, behavioral, and environmental factors to clinical records significantly improves prediction of utilization, cost, and disease progression. This reinforced a key shift: population health programs must look beyond clinical events to the broader context of a patient’s life.
Behavioral health and SDoH integration finally scaled
The 2025 research community reaffirmed that traditional indices were insufficient for modern population health; enhanced measures, such as the bADI produced more accurate, actionable insights. Health systems and plans responded by embedding SDoH and behavioral health signals into their risk models, outreach strategies, and care management programs.
The concept of an “intelligent health ecosystem” gained traction
Academic proposals this year — including a notable 2025 framework describing a learning, AI-supported health ecosystem — highlighted how interoperability, data normalization, and continuous intelligence can reshape care delivery. This vision closely aligned with what leading payers and providers began deploying in practice.
Theme #4: The Cost of Inaction Became Even More Conspicuous
While leading organizations moved decisively, those without integrated, actionable data experienced widening challenges.
The American Hospital Association emphasized that rising labor costs and the growing chronic disease burden have created unprecedented operational pressure. Without clean, connected data, organizations struggled with:
- preventable readmissions
- duplicative testing
- documentation friction
- clinical blind spots
- inequitable care patterns
Meanwhile, UnitedHealth Group’s 2025 analysis highlighted the persistent inefficiencies of a fee-for-service approach — inefficiencies that interoperability and value-based programs are specifically designed to fix.
The industry takeaway was clear: organizations without modern data infrastructure will face growing financial, operational, and clinical risk.
Looking Ahead to 2026
The upward trajectory of interoperability and real-time intelligence will continue. Based on this year’s findings, we expect to see:
- deeper adoption of FHIR and event-driven data exchange
- expanded integration of SDoH and behavioral health data
- increased automation in administrative workflows
- more precise, proactive population health initiatives
- accelerated growth of value-based models tied to measurable outcomes
We’re grateful to our partners across the industry who are building a more connected, equitable, and efficient healthcare system. For more, read our post on 2026 Predictions.
Here’s to a 2026 where healthcare data works the way healthcare deserves.
