As 2025 begins its trajectory towards the end of the year, I find myself reflecting on what an extraordinary year it’s been for health decision-making. If 2024 was about AI making promises, 2025 was about those promises meeting reality, and teaching us some surprising lessons along the way.

This year, we witnessed healthcare crossing a threshold that many thought was still years away. AI didn’t just arrive in healthcare: it moved in, unpacked its bags, and started re-shaping how we make decisions about our health. And in doing so, it forced us all to ask a question we weren’t quite yet ready for: When technology can decide, should it?

The AI Revolution That Actually Happened

Let me share something remarkable: healthcare, long dismissed as a digital laggard, is now setting the pace for enterprise AI adoption. A comprehensive survey of over 700 healthcare executives revealed that organizations are no longer running pilot programs—they’re deploying AI at scale. Kaiser Permanente rolled out ambient documentation solutions across 40 hospitals and 600+ medical offices, marking the largest generative AI deployment in healthcare history.But here’s what really matters: this isn’t about technology for technology’s sake. AI decision-making tools became mainstream in 2025, giving doctors immediate access to evidence-based research and treatment guidelines while accelerating diagnoses and minimizing diagnostic errors. We’re finally seeing AI augment human judgment rather than attempting to replace it.

The Cognitive Load Crisis Most Didn’t See Coming

While everyone was celebrating AI’s capabilities, something unexpected emerged: we discovered we were drowning in our own decisions.

A groundbreaking systematic review published in July 2025 found that 45% of studies showed significant decision fatigue effects across diagnostic, test ordering, prescribing, and therapeutic decisions among healthcare professionals. Physicians, it turns out, make an average of 13.4 clinically relevant decisions during each patient visit. Multiply that by a full day’s schedule, and you begin to understand the mental marathon healthcare providers run daily.

But it’s not just clinicians feeling the burden. Patients and caregivers face their own version of this challenge. Every health app promises to empower us with data, but research on cognitive load theory reveals that learning, engagement, and performance are negatively impacted when working memory is exceeded. We’ve reached a point where the tools designed to help us make better decisions are paradoxically making decision-making harder.

The Real Shift: From Doing Everything to Deciding What Matters

Here’s where 2025 gets interesting. We started the year thinking more data meant better decisions. We’re ending it with a more nuanced understanding: the right data, delivered at the right time, in the right format, enables better decisions.

AI systems can now process vast amounts of patient information, including medical histories, test results, treatment responses, and clinical guidelines, to develop personalized care strategies. But the breakthrough isn’t in the processing power; it’s in the curation. The most successful AI applications in 2025 weren’t the ones that gave us more information; they were the ones that gave us clarity.

Consider OpenEvidence, which raised $410 million this year and became one of the fastest-growing applications for physicians in history. Its success isn’t about generating more content; it’s about cutting through the noise to deliver evidence-based answers precisely when clinicians need them.

What We Got Right (And What We’re Still Figuring Out)

The success stories of 2025 share common threads. The most effective AI systems were built using a human-centered approach that combines an ethnographic understanding of health systems with AI, engaging appropriate stakeholders including physicians, caregivers, patients, and subject experts.

When healthcare organizations rushed to implement AI without understanding workflow realities, they stumbled. When they took time to understand the actual problems people face in making health decisions: the cognitive burdens, the time pressures, the uncertainty, they created tools that truly helped.

But we’re still wrestling with critical questions. Who owns your health data when it’s feeding an AI model? Implementation considerations now explicitly include data protection, technical security, interoperability, transparency, explainability, inclusiveness, equity, minimizing bias, and responsibility and accountability. These aren’t just technical challenges; they’re deeply human ones that will shape healthcare’s future.

The Decision Maker’s Dilemma

Perhaps the most thoughtful insight from 2025 is this: the goal was never to remove humans from decision-making. It was to create the conditions for humans to make better decisions.

Your AI-powered health app can track your sleep patterns, monitor your heart rate variability, and predict when you might be getting sick. But should it decide whether you need to see a doctor? Should it choose your treatment plan? Should your digital twin make healthcare decisions for you?

The answer that emerged in 2025 is nuanced: AI should inform, illuminate, and support—but the final decision should remain deeply, fundamentally human. Because health decisions aren’t just about data points and probabilities. They’re about values, preferences, lived experiences, and the complex interplay of factors that make you uniquely you.

Looking Forward: 2026 and Beyond

As we step into 2026, we’re entering what I believe will be the “decision quality” era. The question is no longer “Can AI help with health decisions?” but rather “How do we ensure AI helps us make decisions that are not just accurate, but right for each individual?”

Organizations that move quickly through the AI adoption phase are capturing advantages in cost structure, patient satisfaction, and clinical outcomes, while those that move slowly risk falling irreversibly behind. But speed without wisdom leads nowhere meaningful.

Your Decisions Matter Most

Here’s my challenge to you as 2025 comes to a close: Audit your relationship with health technology. Are your apps serving you, or are you serving them? Are you making decisions, or are you being decided for?

Start 2026 by reclaiming your role as the “CEO” of your health decisions. Let AI be your consultant, your research assistant, your tireless data analyst. But, whatever else you do, don’t abdicate the “corner office”: your health, your values, your life, your decisions.

The future of healthcare isn’t about humans vs. machines. It’s about humans with machines, working in partnership to navigate the most important decisions we’ll ever make. And that future? It’s not coming—it’s already here.

Here’s to a year of smarter, more thoughtful, more human decisions ahead.

What was your biggest health decision of 2025? How did technology help or hinder that decision? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash