📉 2025 Was the Lost Year in Health Tech for AI, Data Analytics, and Telehealth
2024 was the year of AI tourists in health tech. 2025 was, hands down, the year of GLP-1 and biotech breakthroughs.
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🎄🕎 Happy Holidays, everyone. First, I want to thank all of you for your loyalty and support, especially my paid subscribers and Founding Members. 🙏❤️
I enjoy interacting with all of you online, but I enjoy meeting you in person even more at the healthcare and tech conferences where I was so fortunate to get invited to speak this year.
2025 was a tough year for me, but also a rewarding one. Tough, because of the never-ending stream of threats. When the industry is run like a mafia, and you’re in the business of exposing the mafia, threats come with the territory. That’s part of my life.
2025 was rewarding because of you. The support from my subscribers, especially my paid subscribers and Founding Members, has been overwhelming. As long as I have your backing, and as long as I can borrow some of the courage from those of you who came forward this year with incredible inside stories, I’ll keep going. Those stories fueled a lot of my investigations, including the ones about the healthcare mafia and fraud. They gave me the energy and the inspiration when I needed it most.
🙏 Thank you to everyone who’s been on my side. I hope it’s the side of hope and transparency.
And a special thank you and tons of gratitude to my friend and co-host of our podcast, Digital Health Inside Out, Alex Koshykov. To my genuine surprise, he named me the Health Tech Person of 2025 in the year-end episode of Digital Health Vitals that just dropped. 🏆 I’m truly humbled.
And who did I pick as the Health Tech Person of 2025. It’s in the article below. 🙂
In this year-end piece, I’ll recap 2025 in health tech and make a few bold predictions for 2026.
But first, this. In over two years of running this Substack, I have never done any promotions. I hate marketing, to be honest. But Christmas is my weak spot. 🎄 I am running a limited 20% off sale on my already discounted annual plan, with a hard stop on January 7. No ifs. No buts. Click here to get the holiday special. (Substack might make you sign up first.)
2025 was a record-breaking year for dealmaking. It was also a defeat for a big chunk of AI hype and, in some ways, a triumph of science. AI, data analytics, and telehealth were the worst-performing sectors of health tech. GLP-1, biotech, and genomics were the best.
I’ll share the details and the reasons behind the 2025 winners and losers with my paid subscribers in my next Substack piece. Please stay tuned.
As my readers know, I track health tech sectors closely through my own database of publicly traded digital health companies. As far as I know, it’s the only one of its kind.
That database lets me dig up insights media coverage misses. Mass media gets paid to run interviews with VC bros and startup founders. I do the unsexy work. Build the dataset, run the analysis, and say what the numbers actually say.
TL;DR:
1. Everyone got an agent in 2025. You get an agent. You get an agent. You get an agent.
2. “Make Health Tech Great Again” — more like “Make Health Tech a Lobbyist Rolodex”
3. The Lost Decade of Venture Capital
4. 2025 Was the Year of Dealmaking in Health Tech
5. My 2025 Healthcare/AI investigations
6. My 2025 Analysis of AI Models in Healthcare
7. How My 2025 Health Tech Predictions Panned Out
8. Best Company in Health Tech of 2025
9. Worst Company in Health Tech of 2025
10. Biggest loser in health tech of 2025
11. Shadiest Company in Health Tech of 2025
12. Person of the Year in Health Tech
13. Inspiration in Health Tech of 2025
14. Biggest Health Tech Story of 2025
15. Health Tech Deal of the Year
16. 🔮 My Four Bold Predictions in Health Tech for 2026
1. Everyone got an agent in 2025. You get an agent. You get an agent. You get an agent.
Everyone got an agent in 2025. You get an agent. You get an agent. You get an agent.
Everyone is seemingly building an AI agent in healthcare:
GPT-5 has its Superagent, heavily advertised by Oscar Health.
Hippocratic AI has Polaris 3.0.
Microsoft has MAI-DxO.
And yet, no one is even close to building something that truly makes a difference.
It’s going to take years. Probably many years. Don’t listen to the hype. Look at the facts.
2. “Make Health Tech Great Again” — more like “Make Health Tech a Lobbyist Rolodex”
The White House’s “preferred” list of 63 “health tech” companies doesn’t represent the industry I know. The story, unfortunately, remains the same. Success in health tech, and elsewhere, depends on how close you are to Mar-a-Lago.
But the worst part is the lies coming from Trump’s administration about health science. That has to stop.
3. The Lost Decade of Venture Capital
VC-backed startups are failing at the highest rate in at least a decade. Healthcare has been one of the hardest-hit sectors. As I mentioned, 2025 was especially tough for AI, data analytics, and telehealth.
Unfortunately, we don’t see the true performance numbers in the private sector because venture capital constantly pumps out inflated metrics.
4. 2025 Was the Year of Dealmaking in Health Tech
2025 was a special year for health tech deals, even exceeding 2021 — the year of COVID and fear — in dollar terms.
We’ve had 10 health tech IPOs in 2025. We have not seen that many since the COVID craziness of 2021.
More importantly, the net balance of IPOs versus bankrupt/delisted health tech public companies has turned positive, with only 7 bankruptcies/delistings in health tech in 2025.
5. My 2025 Healthcare/AI investigations
23andMe Has Been Selling Customer DNA Data Since at Least 2018
HealthPrecision’s Misleading Marketing That It’s “98% Accurate” in Medical Recommendations
6. My 2025 Analysis of AI Models in Healthcare
7. How My 2025 Health Tech Predictions Panned Out
I made 7 predictions in health tech at the start of 2025. Let’s see how they panned out.
❌ Fewer digital health IPOs in 2025 and another negative year for IPOs-minus-bankruptcies. FALSE
I got this one completely wrong. It was a great year for health tech IPOs and there were not many public bankruptcies. 23andMe stood out for all the wrong reasons, with its massive bankruptcy and stunning public revelation that it has been selling Americans’ DNA data to the highest bidder.
This was the biggest surprise to me. 10 IPOs vs 7 bankruptcies/delistings is real progress compared to an absolutely awful 2024. Still, a profitable private health tech company is a very rare beast.
❌ (More like a hope) We must kill “AI tourists” in healthcare. FALSE
Nope. We have not killed AI tourists in healthcare. I was wrong about that. The fact that these AI imposters exist in such massive quantities speaks volumes about how fragmented American healthcare is. I guess it was my wishful thinking for my early retirement. 😅
❌ The GLP-1 hype will cool off in 2025. FALSE
2025 was a great year for GLP-1 producers and resellers. HIMS, for example, has had a 45% total stock return (as of 12/22/2025) so far this year.
❌ (Another hope) Capital will finally start flowing to genuine digital health innovators. FALSE
Oh man, I got it so wrong. With Trump’s administration and its “who you know” approach, genuine health tech innovation has moved far down the list in America.
✅ 2025 will bring AI innovations across pharmaceutical drug discovery, genetics, and biotech. SO TRUE
Indeed, 2025 has been one of the best years on record for these three disciplines. I’ll explain it in detail to my paid subscribers in my next Substack piece.
✅ Health insurers and PBMs will tighten their stranglehold. TRUE
I would be thrilled to admit I was wrong on this one. But the story keeps going.
These oligopolies are laughing all the way to the bank while the public keeps saying, “Let’s finally do something. We can’t live like this in healthcare.”
Health insurers, shamelessly and for no reason whatsoever, keep jacking up premiums and cutting reimbursement rates for doctors. PBMs are having one of the most profitable years on record in 2025.
The medical community has to finally move from discussion to policy change.
✅ No AI agents in healthcare on a large scale yet in 2025. TRUE
The easiest prediction for years to come. 🤷♂️ Everyone claims they have an agent. But once you dismiss the hype and the cheesy marketing, there is nothing there.
