Gigatrends Reshaping Global Health Care: Insights for CPC+CBEx 2025

Futurist Thomas Koulopoulos explores how “gigatrends”—seismic global shifts like changing demographics and AI—are redefining health care, urging a balance between innovation and trust as the industry evolves toward more human-centered, tech-enabled care that fuels both wellbeing and economic growth.

In your keynote session at CPC+CBEx 2025, you described “gigatrends” as driving a radical shift in health care, what distinguishes a gigatrend from other macro trends, and which one do you believe will most fundamentally reshape how care is delivered in the next decade?

Thomas Koulopoulos: One of the things that distinguishes a gigatrend from other macro trends is that gigatrends, in our estimation, affect a billion or more people. We're looking at trends that are global in nature, that are seismic. They affect so many other aspects of our lives, the way we live, the way we work, the way we play.

One of the gigatrends that we talk about is the shifting demographic makeup of the globe. This is going to affect everything—not just technology, but also health care, the way that we feed our population, agriculture, and education. All of this will be impacted by change in demographics. A gigatrend is a trend that spawns many other trends because it affects at least a billion people or more.

You emphasize the need to evolve legacy models into artificial intelligence (AI)-supported, adaptive systems. What do you see as the biggest barriers to this evolution?

Koulopoulos: When we look at AI and its application in health care, the barriers are many. I think we have to be very careful here because, for example, one of the barriers that is definitely going to impede the progress of AI is the degree to which we trust it much too early. We tend to like to do that with technology.

As consumers, we trust our technologies in ways that perhaps they don't deserve. In a clinical setting, that's much more important because putting trust in a diagnosis—whether it be an x-ray in the way it's being read by a radiologist or an AI versus a clinical diagnosis by a doctor or an AI—can lead to incredibly critical repercussions.

The element of trust is one that we have to look at very carefully and make sure that these systems are ready to be trusted before they're deployed. The reality is that if we deploy them before they're worthy of that trust, we're going to backtrack. We're going to create longer term impediments that cause us to take a much slower approach to the adoption of AI.

We have to be careful. I think we should still be aggressive in rolling out AI and experimenting with it but be careful in how we apply it to those areas where it can have critical implications.

Generational shifts, virtual care, and new tech players are all reshaping patient expectations. How can traditional health care systems adapt fast enough to remain relevant and competitive in this new landscape?

Koulopoulos: Traditional health care systems have to adapt to remain competitive in this new generational landscape. What I mean by that is I've got a 26 and a 30-year-old. They don't want to go in clinic for doctor visits, they want to do everything virtually. It's not just because they don't like the in-person, it's because that's inconvenient.

What traditional providers have to look at is, how do I create greater convenience for the patient? Doing that isn't just treating the patient more like a consumer, it improves health care because the more convenient health care is, the more likely I am to have continuity of care, to reach out to my doctor or my clinician when I need to rather than putting something off.

We often mistake convenience for consumerism. In health care, convenience actually creates greater continuity of care, and it creates more likely positive outcomes. Younger generations are going to look for ways to hack the system, to get rid of that friction, and to create that convenience factor.

If we don't do it within traditional health care, what we're going to find is that the tech vendors will do it with shadow health care systems to which this younger generation is drawn. They love the notion of a $100 a month concierge service. In reality, you're not getting concierge service, you're getting much less than that.

Traditional health care players need to look at these generational behaviors, acknowledge them, and then create systems through which these younger generations can interact more frequently and engage more readily with their health care providers.

In your keynote, you propose reframing healthcare as a driver of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and economic health, not just a cost center. How do we begin to shift both policy and public mindset toward that bold vision?

Koulopoulos: One of the most important narratives that we have to change in health care is this notion that health care is just about cost. Health care costs will go up. It's an absolute inevitability, and they'll go up because diagnostics are improving. We have new therapies, new pharmaceuticals, we're treating illnesses that were too narrow in the past to be treated, and that's going to be costly.

We're an older population who are more complex with more comorbidities. All of that will increase cost. But what if, rather than just look at costs, we look at that as an investment—an investment in how we can increase GDP and our overall economic prosperity. My thought is that today we have two converging lines, the cost of health care is converging with GDP, and if you draw those two lines all the way out to 2100, the two actually intersect, which is absurd.

We can't have our entire economy be health care. What if instead the GDP line actually grew faster than the health care cost line? Both are increasing, but GDP is increasing much faster. If you don't believe health care has an implication on our economic wellbeing, look at the pandemic. $20 trillion has been spent globally, and counting, just on dealing with the implications of the pandemic. Clearly, health care contributes to economic prosperity, and it may very well end up being the single greatest contributor to a nation's wellbeing long term.

When people ask you what AI will most do for health care, how do you answer?

Koulopoulos: When people ask me what AI will do most for health care, my response is actually a very simple one. It will elevate the humanity of health care. It will allow clinicians to do what clinicians have wanted to do from the outset, to build relationships with patients, to understand them in order to be able to diagnose them at a deeper level than just a symptomatic level at a 10-minute consult.

Today, clinicians spend so much of their time looking at a screen and updating the medical record. If AI does anything, it increases the humanity of health care, not just of the health care workers, but the way it feels to me as a patient. That is the greatest long-term benefit of AI and its most prominent benefit.