From advances in AI to the new US administration, 2025 is set to be an eventful year for the biopharmaceutical industry, inviting numerous opportunities to change the status quo.

At Avalere Health, we pride ourselves in staying on top of the critical healthcare trends so that we can continue to provide the most innovative and relevant solutions for our clients.

Digital innovations like AI are set to transform the way tasks are carried out and impact the patient experience, omnichannel engagement is becoming essential for clients to best reach their audience, the ‘social-media influencer’ might begin to play a larger role in healthcare, and all eyes will be set on how the new Trump administration may set and establish legislation around these trends.

Last month, leaders from across our capabilities were asked to join a roundtable with Med Ad News to share their insights on the evolving direction of the healthcare and biopharmaceutical industry. Here’s what they had to say.

What are the key areas in which the 2024 election will impact health care?

Sarah Alwardt, President, Advisory: The 2024 election results are in: former President Donald Trump has been elected the 47^th President of the United States and Republicans will also take control of a Senate majority in the next Congress. Healthcare was not a primary focus for the Trump/Vance campaign, but there are several consequential healthcare decisions the new administration will face in 2025 related to ongoing implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the expiration of the enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium subsidies at the end of next year.

A Republican-controlled Senate will help create a glidepath for President Trump’s preferred nominees in the early days of the administration. Looking further ahead, the expanded ACA premium subsidies and many of the tax cuts passed under the previous Trump administration will expire at the end of 2025 without Congressional action. Depending on control of the House, extensions of either of these two policies could set up a negotiation between Congressional Democrats and Republicans and create a potential legislative vehicle for other health-related policies, such as the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) and 340B reforms considered in the current Congress, or incremental reforms to the IRA’s drug pricing provisions.

The early weeks and months of a new administration present opportunities to rescind policies of the outgoing administration, and the Congressional Review Act could be used to repeal recent healthcare regulations if Republicans also gain control of the House.

Our stakeholders will need support to navigate uncertain waters – for example, understanding how these changes will impact innovation and if there will be adjustments in patients’ health outcomes or health equity. With so many evolutions on the horizon, firms can provide guidance on which data analyses, market insights, and even clinical trial results can be used to guide new business strategies.

How is the agency-client relationship evolving?

Whitney Morley, Managing Director, Global Marketing: The edges between our clients’ roles are blurring. Gone are the days when teams purely focused on marketing, medical, policy, or access. Instead, our clients are wearing a variety of hats, which is leading to more opportunities to

bring in cross-functional expertise grounded in unified strategies.

As technology advances, we are seeing a real enthusiasm for sophisticated digital innovation. Our clients are excited about the opportunity that innovative omnichannel marketing offers to build personalized and engaging patient and provider experiences. For example, leveraging modular content architectures to develop deeply tailored engagements that meet each audience where they are and at the moments that matter.

However, true omnichannel marketing takes agility, which can be challenging in larger pharmaceutical organizations where the infrastructure often is lacking to create flexible and personalized experiences. But, with any challenge, there is opportunity. We’re working with our clients to drive omnichannel transformation, including supporting affiliate teams on the ground. We’re involving them far earlier in the marketing process to gain insights, co-create with them, and localize the global omnichannel strategy.

While the size of the field force has largely remained stable, we have also noticed an imbalance in distribution with more field teams focused on emerging markets. So, we are uncovering more ways to support established markets, developing bespoke enterprise platforms and tools that help drive omnichannel strategy and execution at a local level.

Annemarie Armstrong, Chief Commercial Officer: The agency-client relationship is indeed evolving — particularly as technology, media consumption, and customer behaviors evolve — yet the fundamentals of a solid agency-client partnership remain. A strong agency-client partnership is always built on trust, transparency, and a drive to keep innovating and ideating.

However, clients are also now facing complex challenges including economic uncertainties, heightened competition, and continued digital transformation of their marketing efforts, including the use of AI. There is a much greater emphasis on data-driven decision-making and personalized marketing, which has strategic and operational implications. A one-size-fits-all approach — to messaging, experience, channel — is no longer enough in this evolved landscape. In a world where there seems to be a new digital platform emerging every other day, there is a greater need to help clients prioritize and make thoughtful decisions about how and where to engage. Agency partners require deep and broad expertise in insights, strategy, and creativity, but also great depth in data, media, analytics, and technology. Clients expect this depth and breadth in their day-to-day cross-functional team, not just in thought leaders.

For us, it’s about helping clients create a brand that evolves and adapts to the marketplace with new data, new competitors, and new customers. Brands that continually adapt and stay relevant will thrive. This requires agencies to ensure day-to-day marketing expertise is grounded in data science and technology to drive insights, targeting, and ultimately engagement. We are still helping our clients’ innovations connect with patients, but we are now doing so in a more data-driven, collaborative, agile, and adaptive way.

What are the biggest challenges agencies encounter as they navigate the increasingly complex domestic and global environment?

Sarah Alwardt, President, Advisory: In 2024, our clients did a tremendous amount of restructuring and realignment in response to the significant policy changes that came from the IRA, but it feels like that’s starting to settle down.

The impact of the IRA has been significant, with the U.S. market moving closer (but not identical) to our EU counterparts in terms of requiring greater integration of evidence, value, and policy into market access strategy. Policy has always had an important role in influencing the ecosystem, from plan availability to coverage and benefit design, but the IRA included changes like negotiation that will have direct impacts on branded, commercialized products. As a result, brand teams are thinking more about the policy environment. Negotiation requires new types of information, including real-world evidence, making evidence strategy much more important to commercial teams. Companies have started thinking about evidence and value proposition in the U.S. and are noting some similarities with global approaches to health technology assessment.

Facing these changes, many of our clients began thinking about how their internal ecosystems were organized to support branded products, asking themselves if they needed separate verticals for the U.S. and globally. Companies have been realigning their organizational structure to better reflect the U.S. market realities and create further synergies with their global teams. There are some cost savings in these decisions, but policy change is a driving force behind many of these company reorganizations.

 

How are the rapid changes in the social media landscape impacting your strategy and work with clients?

Jeffrey D. Erb, Chief Media Officer: Social media continues to be an integral and growing element in healthcare strategy and engagement for healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers. From a patient perspective, authenticity is key. Patients are looking for brands that understand their needs and work with communities to provide deeper insight into how others manage conditions successfully through video and storytelling. With eMarketer reporting that nearly half of respondents who use social media to find healthcare information either follow, engage with, or follow and engage with influencers on social platforms, it’s clear that social media has a growing role in reaching consumer audiences.

Reaching healthcare professionals with advertising on physician-oriented social media platforms is table stakes for most brands. However, recently, we have seen more brands targeting healthcare professionals during their blue jean moments on platforms such as Meta and X. They are going beyond the limitations of NPI matches to build connections based on verified personal email addresses. Within endemic platforms, companies are mining conversations to gain a deeper understanding of individual learning preferences and inform modular creative and personalized content targeting.

We’re also seeing an increasing use of digital opinion leaders (DOLs) who have an engaged, captive audience in a specific subject or therapy area. They could include academics, researchers, community leaders, patient representatives, or publishers. These leaders allow companies to provide educational content that resonates more successfully with their audience. They also open the door to work with a wider range of influencers and opinion formers and offer the opportunity to reach younger, more digitally engaged healthcare professionals.​

 

What technologies are facilitating better targeting of HCPs, patients, and other relevant audiences (i.e., caregivers, family members)?

Jeffrey D. Erb, Chief Media Officer: Artificial intelligence and machine learning have transformed the way we target healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers, opening the door for more sophisticated omnichannel engagement.

An omnichannel approach can take many forms. Instead of a full-scale enterprise-wide implementation, it often starts with a crawl, where companies better understand their audience, leveraging technologies that produce insights about their target audience with innovations that drive personalization.

Agencies that combine creative, strategy, media, and analytics into a single unified solution are best positioned to create a successful strategy and strategically leverage multiple innovations to drive omnichannel engagement. Without the seamless integration of media and analytics, AORs cannot leverage up-to-the-minute data and innovation into their overall strategy. Without the integration of strategy and creativity, media agencies are not well-equipped to deliver meaningful engagement.

We work to build holistic approaches that deeply understand and engage with audiences. For example, leveraging technology to dive into the individual learning preferences of healthcare professionals and deliver relevant communications based on what is happening at any given moment in their office. We are also incorporating AI to understand how that learning behavior changes and evolves on an ongoing basis, using predictive decision-making to provide essential information based on the healthcare professional’s specific needs.

The technology helps us comprehensively understand patient experiences with specific conditions. We can collect and compile public reviews of treatments and subject them to AI sentiment analysis. Within 24 hours, we can reveal positive and negative aspects of treatment options and pinpoint topics for tailor-made editorial content that resonates with specific audiences. For example, customized video content supported by educational resources that evolve throughout the patient journey to help them take charge of their health.

We all know that transformation doesn’t happen overnight. But with the appropriate due diligence, holistic agency representation, and commitment to following a process, we can weave a connected engagement pattern. We can reach people in meaningful ways, building the connection that leads to better health.

What are the top biopharma/biotech trends to watch in 2025?

Dan Zaksas, Ph.D., Chief Medical Officer: If I had to pick one word to encapsulate the trends across the industry, it’s efficiency. On one hand, we have seen a constraint of funding for activities across the bench-to-commercialization spectrum, affecting the industry and, consequently, agency partners. Pharma pipelines have trimmed and some 50 emerging biotechs have shut down over the past two years. The mood for a 2025 rebound can only be described as cautiously optimistic. But the market challenges belie a quiet efficiency revolution with many positive connotations. Much has been made of the speed with which AI-driven drug discovery has pushed viable candidates into pipelines, and the next year promises to start matching results with the industry’s enthusiasm.

Shedding decades of convention, clinical development programs that incorporate advanced approaches such as digital twinning will start to accelerate assets out of the lab and into patient trials with greater predictability. Therapies are also gaining efficiency through improved targeting and delivery, including ADCs and cell therapies in oncology, gene editing, and RNA-based therapeutics. Over the years, this has been discussed as an emerging trend, but one glance at the 2024 FDA approvals and the upcoming 2025 PDUFA calendar tells us the landscape of precision medicine is rapidly maturing. As we look to the near future, with the great power of precision therapeutics comes the great responsibility of bringing hyper-targeted, omnichannel-driven communications forcefully into our mainstream. Efficiency realized.

Sarah Alwardt, President, Advisory: Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming our ecosystem. AI today is being utilized to analyze large amounts of data in clinical trials, improve efficiencies in health economics outcomes research, streamline literature reviews, and identify patient subgroups who respond to treatments differently. It’s heartening to see the large number of companies that are developing AI solutions to solve unique obstacles to further their goals. And as AI algorithms improve, it will help us better identify disparities, or the potential for disparity, so we can uncover further opportunities to connect every patient with the treatment and care they need and deserve.

While AI use-case studies continue to generate excitement, the challenge of how to best select data, avoid bias, and protect patient information remains a concern. Another issue that we are beginning to see is the growing number of AI hallucinations, which can happen when AI generates incorrect or misleading information, “sees” objects that aren’t there, or produces language that is nonsensical but seems coherent. Building strong internal rules and governance on AI and continually testing and refining its development can reduce AI hallucinations. Applied correctly, AI can revolutionize the way real-world evidence is generated, which in turn improves our ability to build strong value and effectiveness support for new therapies.

I think part of the challenge with AI right now is that it can be used for anything. The companies that are going to be successful in this space are the ones with a strong internal strategy on how they want to use AI—they’ve chosen their approach and exploited a market niche or found a unique way of using AI to further their goals. The smartest companies are thinking about how to harness what is being developed, how they will deploy it, what their internal rules and governance around use, and how they will ensure their results are accurate and minimize hallucinations. Healthcare companies should be thinking seriously about all these things. And this is not just a trend; it’s going to be happening in the next one to two years.

Amar Urhekar, Chief Executive Officer: In North America and globally, there are still many people who require support accessing the treatment and care they need. For example, according to the National Rural Health Association, 77 percent of rural counties in the US are considered medical deserts. That means approximately 30 million people live without access to healthcare – a mind-blowing statistic. Within and outside of rural populations, millions of people are struggling to access the care they need and deserve. These figures are sobering, but they also highlight the urgent need to bring the industry together to reach every person.

If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that technology gives us the power to unlock new ways of bridging the gap between people and their care. Throughout this Roundtable, we have heard several mentions of the promise of AI. We have seen that digital innovations allow us to delve deeper into healthcare challenges and meet people where they are faster than ever before. We have experienced the role of technology in helping us expedite product launches and streamline patient access, ensuring more people can faster benefit from life-changing treatments. It’s clear we have the tools and talent to disrupt the ordinary – to create real solutions that drive real change for patients everywhere.

So, my hope for 2025 is that we remember the fundamentals – the reasons why we have dedicated our careers to improving health. That we use technological innovations to partner with our clients differently, developing strategic, scientific, and creative solutions that transform the healthcare experience for all and unite us in a common goal of reaching more people. Because in 2025, there is no excuse to leave patients behind.