As we look ahead to 2025, some with extreme excitement and others with extreme trepidation, theory is a useful tool to help us separate the signal from the noise. When it comes to health and health care, there is no shortage of fodder for prediction pieces. Here, I focus on the high-level public health landscape in the year to come.
Similar to last year, I’m sharing three ideas of what may unfold in 2025 through the lens of the theories of Disruptive Innovation.
In each of the sections below, I hope you’ll see more than just the application of theory to our current state. In addition to the predictions themselves, I hope you’ll also gain knowledge on how to apply the theory to what you see going on around you. In short, may this help you with how to think, not just what to think.
Let’s dive into it.
Buyer beware: Food-borne illness outbreaks and food recalls will (continue to) rise
As any news reader can attest, the rate of food-borne illnesses and associated recalls has increased lately. In her recent newsletter, Emily Oster visualized this problem quite well regarding listeria (see image below).
Many reports have noted that the rise in contaminated food and associated illnesses and deaths is directly related to the food safety deregulation that occurred during President Trump’s first term. An independent analysis by Science found that FDA warning letters fell by a third to a half (depending on the type) as compared to those under the Obama administration.
Trump’s second term is likely to include additional deregulation around food safety. Given records from the first term, and declarations about what’s to come, we can expect rates of food contamination and its associated consequences to rise.
But what does theory have to say about this?
Modularity Theory states that if the interfaces between a system’s components aren’t predictable, verifiable, and specifiable, an interdependent solution is required for the system to function optimally. That is, one entity needs to wrap its arms around the entire problem to solve it.
Since US farmers ship food across state lines and food is imported from other countries, modularizing food safety at the state, industry, or even company level is not fully effective. As the pork industry’s recent experience highlights, self-policing leads to more safety violations, not fewer. Few would disagree that our US food system has extensive room for improvement, but both the past and Modularity Theory highlight that further limiting the power of federal food safety oversight isn’t the best pathway to fewer illnesses.
Medical and health-related misinformation will further disrupt scientific expertise
I’ll start this section by noting that disruption is a process, not a one-time event. As we’ve seen in other industries—discount retail, lodging, and even steel—disruption unfolds over decades. In recent years, we’ve seen the phenomenon start to play out in the realm of medical expertise.
As Disruptive Innovation Theory explains, disruptions get their start in spaces of non-consumption, where people can’t access or afford the available products or services. Today, fewer people consume medical and scientific expertise via centralized sources, such as the nightly news or nationally-recognized newspapers, than did in prior years and decades. The result is a swath of non-consumption of this once well-regarded expertise. What’s being consumed instead (and I hypothesize that it’s because, like any disruptive offering, it feels more “accessible”) is the misinformation spread on social platforms.
The result is growing distrust in the institutions and experts responsible for caring for us in some of our most vulnerable moments. A recent study found that Americans’ trust in health care institutions fell from 71% in April 2020 to 40% in January 2024. It goes without saying, but this is a massive decline in public trust.
Due to the decentralization of information dissemination made possible by social media, the barrier to entry to take the position of a self-proclaimed expert is extremely low. Without a vetting process, it’s easy for almost anyone to spread their message en masse. Low barriers to entry combined with social media as a technological enabler make the environment ripe for self-proclaimed experts to further spread additional misinformation. As more misinformation spreads, public trust in medical expertise continues to fall, which further fuels misinformation consumption, which ultimately fuels more of its creation. Social media algorithms feed us more of what we watch, click on, and interact with on their platforms. So, the more we consume misinformation, the more we see it and the less we see the medical and scientific experts that were once celebrated as a great American strength.
Combining the current environment with a prominent vaccine skeptic at the helm of the nation’s health and human services, we are in a position where medical expertise and decades of established truth will be further challenged. Therefore, misinformation—especially around vaccine safety and efficacy—is likely to be consumed and believed at a faster pace and to a greater extent in 2025 than it is today. The result will be that misinformation moves “upmarket,” further disrupting medical experts and the scientific evidence that promotes individual and collective health.
Due to the combination of decentralized information dissemination, low barriers to entry for self-proclaimed experts, plus the likely promotion of misinformation from platforms of power, waning trust in scientific evidence is likely to further erode. Unfortunately, if this continues unchecked, our collective health and well-being will as well.
Medical practitioners and executives, public health champions, and all believers in scientific evidence and the scientific method have their work cut out for them in 2025 and beyond.
All hope is not lost: Public health and medical experts will rise to the occasion
The majority of public health leaders, physicians, and other medical experts enter their field to help people. Looking through the lens of Jobs to Be Done theory, these leaders and experts are likely to “hire” amplifying their expertise from their platforms. While they may not have the positions of newly appointed federal leaders, these experts will make a large impact on their patients through direct relationships, on their followers via their social media audiences, and on individuals in their real-world communities.
It’s likely that public health and medical experts will seek to amplify their perspectives based on their current circumstances. While I haven’t performed the Jobs interviews to confidently say what their Jobs are, we can hypothesize that their circumstance is something like, “When my field and personal expertise are under attack…”.
They’ll be most effective in spreading their messages if they also take into account their audiences’ circumstances. For example, many people have emotional and social components to their health-related Jobs to Be Done, which impact whether or not they hire specific medical solutions, such as vaccines.
While message amplification is likely, and hopefully paired with tailoring transparent messages to people’s emotional and social needs, the question is, will we—as a collective nation—believe the experts? Will we enhance our trust in individual medical and public health authorities? While the institutions have lost collective trust, as noted above, a heavy weight rests on the shoulders of the individuals championing medicine, science, and public health.
There is undeniable room to improve—to better communicate what’s known and unknown, to reduce chronic diseases, to learn from the mistakes of the last pandemic, and to better prepare for the next one. But failure to learn from the past ensures the likelihood of repeating its mistakes.
So, for the collective benefit of the population’s health and well-being, I hope 1) experts will “hire” and amplify scientifically-backed and emotionally relevant messages, and 2) our population will “hire” their insights. And perhaps they’ll be made even better by healthy, respectable, informed questioning that pushes for new discoveries. After all, that’s what science is all about.
Your perspective on 2025
Looking through the lens of Modularity Theory, Disruptive Innovation, and Jobs to Be Done, I’ve shared three examples of what theory predicts may come to pass in the year ahead.
Now, what do you forecast will occur in 2025? These tools and lenses are available to you. What will you see through them? And how will you enable your positive visions to come to life?
