By Klaus Boehncke, global digital health lead, Guillaume Duparc, healthcare partner, and Levin Laske, healthcare principal, L.E.K. Consulting
In 2025, the world of healthcare and medical technology has been defined by increased AI adoption and integration into clinical systems, with recent findings outlining that AI-focused deals now make up 75 per cent of health tech funding.
From scribing tools, voice agents, decision support and enhanced diagnostics, to personalised care and streamlining of fragmented data, the past 12 months has seen AI move from the experimentation phase to something that can transform our industry.
So, what’s next for this technology as we head into 2026, and what else will be impacting our world?
Let’s take a look.
Digital “front doors” becoming the norm
As part of the government’s 10 Year Health Plan, by 2028 the NHS App is set to become a full digital front door to the NHS.
While 2026 will be financially challenging for the NHS, we expect continued development of the NHS App and adoption of more sophisticated digital front doors across private and public providers to streamline booking appointments, viewing prescriptions and accessing mobile device enabled health checks, digital therapeutic and telehealth services.
We also expect increasing reliance on AI for call centre operations given the clear economic benefits, with some recent reports finding that over 50% of call centre operations could be replaced by AI.
The potential for personalisation and efficiencies this advancement can bring is expected to be significant and a good place to track development will be with Eastern European broad providers such as Regina Maria, LuxMed and Medicover, all of which operate corporate employer subscription plans and already have sophisticated CRM infrastructures in place.
Asynchronous chat will continue to expand
We expect continued growth in asynchronous chat, which is a way to connect with healthcare providers for a range of patient enquiries that do not need an immediate response, including condition management and non-urgent prescriptions (such as GLP-1 for weight loss).
We also anticipate new categories to emerge such as hormone replacement therapy and longevity offerings.
This type of patient engagement comes at a significantly lower cost than other methods.
Where an in-person consultation with a private GP or a consultant can cost anywhere between £150–£200 per session, with an online private consultation in the range of £40–£50, which is similar to the effective cost of a 10 minute consultation with an NHS GP, asynchronous chat can cost in the realm of £10 or less per consultation, with further gains expected with greater adoption of AI scribes and workflow automation.
We expect continued adoption from both pure play online providers and brick and mortar providers aiming to modernise their offering, following in the footsteps of the likes of Mehilainen in Finland.
Consumer health and AI health assistants
Health and consumer wellness wearables, such as Oura, Whoop and MiniMed from Medtronic, are a fast-growing category, meeting needs for convenience, immediacy and being in control of one’s health.
We expect new entrants with a combination of digital biomarkers and AI health assistant offerings to launch in 2026.
With computer costs continuing to come down and digital biomarker health checks costing less than £1, we also expect adoption of AI-supported health checks to grow.
Digital condition management and screening will rise
Driven by an ageing population, a focus on reducing long-term healthcare system costs, and health consumerism, proactive and preventative care are set to be a large area of investment and technology growth despite public health budgets remaining challenged (e.g., NHS prevention funding).
With cost of screening and condition management being vastly reduced with technology, there is an ongoing move towards more accessible, regular, and lower cost healthcare checks and subsequent remote monitoring, which ultimately enables earlier intervention.
These digital solutions benefit the patient through enhanced quality of life, later onset or elimination of diseases, as well as lower costs for both private and public payers.
Digital therapeutics (DiGAs) in Germany have gained significant traction since 2024 in particular, and the launch of PECAN in France also indicates this as a growing trend.
Digital applications are increasingly prominent across the care continuum, moving from general condition management to areas such as digital rehabilitation and aftercare, guided by evolving reimbursement mechanisms, as observed in Germany via DRV programmes and DiPAs.
Continued innovation will reshape pathways
Continued growth in imaging algorithms, in areas including radiology, cardiology, neurology, will support greater diagnosis efficiency and quality.
Digital pathology, which enables remote review and the ability to apply AI recognition, can speed up early cancer and other disease detection, and there remains significant scope for wider digital pathology adoption.
Wider deployment of diagnostic AI tools is also necessary for wider uptake of precision medicine via the effective use of advanced and expensive diagnostics for the right patients.
It’s exciting to think about how robotics might continue to transform treatment and care, with this technology already improving quality, accuracy and precision, and reducing invasiveness, which often offers a shorter patient recovery and easier care pathway management.
Scribes battle for physician hearts and minds
The usage of scribe tools is reducing time spent on admin, helping to summarise consultations, referral letters and prescriptions, and thus increasing the time available for direct patient interaction.
We expect this to continue to grow globally, with these tools augmented with clinical decision support tools, such as medical information platforms such as OpenEvidence or UpToDate and EMR system vendors to support workflow automation beyond clinical documentation.
Data integration leading to AI-driven insights have the potential to transform care delivery
Data interoperability, including via federated data platforms, is becoming a foundational requirement, and no longer a “nice-to-have”, helping to enable streamlined patient record sharing, predictive analytics and clinical decisions rooted in evidence.
Being able to share patient information across healthcare settings and at-home monitoring tools will become even more critical to ensure efficient, patient-centric care delivery.
Of course, this data can also better support academic, pharma, medtech and AI research e.g. through patient identification, clinical trial recruitment, and real world evidence.
The quest for user friendly, cloud-native, and scalable PMS solutions continues
We expect the continued arrival of modern, cloud-native, AI-enabled practice management software (PMS) solutions in Europe to prompt more outpatient healthcare providers to assess whether their software stack is still fit for purpose.
Product replacement cycles are long, often in the range of 8-15 years, but advancements in technologies over the last 5 years have created a growing delta in “old world” vs “new world” systems.
Advancements in UX/UI, administrative workflow automations, and clinical decision support features make it harder to justify staying put.
As the underlying outpatient provider market in Europe itself consolidates, this will create additional decision points on software selection, and create demand for software that can support larger networks.
Coupled with rising regulatory requirements for PMS, e.g., interoperability, and associated R&D costs, we expect that the European PMS market composition will change more rapidly in the coming years than before as this transition unfolds. This will create opportunities for healthcare providers, software vendors, and investors alike.
