What happened to all those predictions about 2021?
Towards the last quarter of every year, there is a flurry of activity predicting what lies ahead in the new year. Sample some of these headlines that appeared since October 2021…
This is what people around the world predict will happen in 2022 — Ipsos
Predictions 2022: Disruptive Forces Necessitate Bold Decisions
What major themes will we see in global media in 2022? What should we see more of?
You’ll Be Breaking Up With Bad Customers — and 9 Other Predictions for 2022 and Beyond
This is especially a favorite of consulting firms, thinktanks and other organizations in that flock.
What we do not get to see too often is what happened to all those predictions, did it even make a dent into the realities of the world and what, if any, was value of ‘predicting’!
At the beginning of 2021, I reviewed and brought together several such predictions in healthcare in ‘Prediction Game- A roundup of 2021 Healthcare Predictions’. The main categories included- Pandemic predictions, Remote Care, HealthTech, and other miscellaneous related trends. To write that article, I reviewed about more than one hundred prediction features and culled them to the ones that I especially resonated with. A year on since then, I am going to try and see how many of these predictions came to fruition.
Before we begin, however, I would like to quote this story about how experts can get things completely wrong (Written by David Epstein in the pre-covid times, the entire article is itself quite readable). I have para-phrased it to make it more concise-
In 1984, psychologist-political scientist Philip E. Tetlock was astonished with the ways in which National Research Council experts delivered contradictory predictions. To test this further, he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from true skill. The project lasted 20 years, and comprised 82,361 probability estimates about the future.
The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire.
I have of course not studied last year’s predictions in the systematic manner done by Tetlock, but lets see where do most of these predictions stand.
COVID-19 Pandemic and its after-effects
A large chunk of last year’s predictions were linked to the pandemic. Few could have predicted the rise of Delta and subsequently the Omicron waves!
- Vaccination efforts ☑️: Speed of vaccination was a clear winner last year; many experts had predicted upto 4 Billion doses while the actual tally is more than 9 Billion. Of course, this prediction did not include the severe vaccination inequity that exists between the developed vs the developing world.
- Herd Immunity ↩️: Predictions were abound for various countries to reach herd immunity by second or third quarter however of course we do not yet even know what would it mean to achieve herd immunity, let alone predict when will we reach there.
- It was predicted that more research will be continue on pharmaceutical interventions esp for cases such as ‘covid long-haulers’. While long covid has definitely been an area of interest, most of the attention in 2021 continued to be on antivirals and other treatments to treat acute COVID.
- Second Order effects of the pandemic 🔄: Poor outcomes in several chronic diseases such as Cardio-Vascular disorders, Diabetes Mellitus, cancers and several others as well as several Mental health issues such as Depression and Anxiety. This is turning out to be true- according to WHO, 46% countries reported closure of population-level NCD screening programs.
- Emergency regulatory measures ️️️↩️ : As predicted, accelerated approvals and other emergency regulatory/governance procedures were slowed down, but not to a great extent. US FDA granted EUAs for 1 vaccine and 7 drug treatments as compared to 2 vaccines and 7 drug treatments.
Remote Care
The second most talked-about trend/prediction set was about the speed and extent to which healthcare was going remote. Across the range of services for detection/diagnosis through acute care to chronic management, everything was to be disrupted.
- Virtual care through visits 🔃 It was estimated that 1 in 3 patient interactions will go virtual and the change would be permanent. However i in reality, this trend was quite reversible- it is now clear that patients like the flexibility of remote consultations but still prefer in-person visits for several reasons. An analysis by Trilliant Health found that telehealth use decreased by an average of 40.3% a month in 2021 compared to 2020.
- Digital Health companies vs EHR ️️☑️ As predicted, pure-play digital health companies gained more attention that the so-called EHR platforms. According to Rock Health’s Q3 report, funding had already hit $21.3 billion across 541 deals this year.
- Among the other predictions, some continue to gain traction such as rise of research and interest in point-of-care diagnostics and more reliance on wearables and trackers.
Healthcare & Technology
As seen in the first two trends, technological advances and innovations in healthcare carried a lot of weightage overall in all healthcare predictions for 2021.
- Tech’s influence on healthcare ⏫ Several predictions rightly predicted the continued rise of interest, investment and influence of big tech firms such as Amazon, Apple and Google in healthcare.
- Data security and breaches ⏫ Also rightfully pointed by several security experts, there was an overall rise in security breaches that impacted healthcare organizations.
Other interesting trends
Finally in the miscellaneous category, there is a mixed bag of hits and misses.
- Some had predicted a Nobel prize for the vaccine efforts, but this did not happen (maybe can still happen in 2022, beyond?)
- AI driven drug discovery ⏫ there was continued interest in data enabled drug discovery. While the ultimate outcomes are still some time away, there were some good early examples like Exscientia’s two drugs, one for psychosis and one for Alzheimer’s disease, reaching clinical stage, as well as Insilico Medicine, BenevolentAI, and Schrödinger, developing drug candidates through the use of A.I. that reached human clinical trials.
- Decentralised clinical trials ⏫ There was continued rise in companies adopting remote/decentralized trial mechanisms.
- Rise of RNA based precision medicine efforts ⏫ Once again, this proved out to be true-several companies, including the pioneers such as Moderna and BioNTech continued to make progress in their efforts to bring mRNA based treatment to market.
What’s in store for 2022
Looking back at all these predictions, apart from the misses especially in the pandemic related ones, I think there was a good hit-rate for several healthcare predictions overall. To end this retrospective analysis, I would like to point to another interesting read that was published in The Economist-talking about forecasting and value of predictions-
The long-term viability of forecasting will depend, though, not just on accuracy, but also explainability. It’s not enough to learn that there’s a 70% chance of war breaking out between these two countries in the next year, and not the 30% you thought.
There are already predictions being made on 2022 and I will be back with a roundup of these shortly.
