2024 in the rearview, and 2025 in exit signs

What I got wrong (and right) last year, and what I see coming now

With the Christmas trees down and the string lights retangled, it’s hard to fathom that we are only two weeks into 2025. So far, we’ve mourned the country’s longest living president, watched a new-ish political vanguard take form, and experienced unimaginable devastation wrought by fires around Los Angeles. Somehow, the world already looks very different.

The truth is that no one really knows what the future holds. That’s why I both hate and love prediction lists. Like most of America, I’m burned out by punditry and exhausted by the talking heads. But I’m also a scientist with a bevy of hypotheses and lots of hope.

So, with humility, here are three things about 2025 that I’m anticipating:

1. DEI won’t disappear, but it will diverge.

Last year I thought that demographic trends could “force the hand of health care progress.” I was wrong.

In 2024, the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System projected an inflection point towards the United States becoming a majority nonwhite nation. It was the first time that fewer than 50% of newborns were white. And because our health system so consistently fails people of color, I believed the so-called “majority-minority” version of our country would compel a reckoning.

My obvious-in-hindsight mistake was conflating all people of color into one monolithic group that experiences injustice the same way. During the recent general election, pollsters (who arguably should know better) made the same error.

Against expectations, Black and Latino voters shifted seismically to the right and a candidate at the top of the ticket, herself Black and South Asian, did not turn out those same groups. The annihilation of identity politics also permeated our workplaces and schools. In corporate America, there was a retrenchment against DEI efforts. In higher education, there was an effective end to affirmative action.

In 2024 demography wasn’t destiny at all. In fact the assumption that it would may be antithetical to progress. People want to be included and treated fairly, not reduced unidimensionally and dictated to.

My conversations with industry leaders also helped make clear that for all those who are committed to the actual goals of diversity, equity and inclusion–many of whom are now lamenting the loss of bespoke initiatives and programming–we may actually have an opportunity to chart a new, and potentially better, course. (If this reads like I’m giving myself a pep talk it’s because I am).

Here’s what I’m certain of: in 2025, pandering will fail just as it did in 2024. But purposeful policies, products, and services that are designed to affirm and engage the people who need them are likely to succeed.

2. Automation will kill (or anoint) the digital health star.

Last year, I predicted (correctly in this case) that many digital health players would fade to black as capital became more constrained and buyers became less attentive to shiny objects. I’m confident that 2025 will continue this trend.

But this time there is a new driving force in the mix, one that accelerates the potential upside. I believe the coming months will quickly differentiate digital health companies that are A.I. capable from those who are not.

The use cases for a newly democratized form of generative A.I. to transform routine tasks are incredibly broad (Anthropic’s Claude is helping me write this right now). And in healthcare the use cases come with step-change implications for both the bottomline and topline. Already, A.I. is being applied to diagnosis and screening, drug discovery and development, personalized medicine, and of course, health care’s albatross: the one-third of all spending that the National Academies of Medicine has called “administrative waste.”

I just asked Perplexity.AI to quantify the opportunity for me, and it pointed me to the National Bureau of Economic Research in which my friend Nikhil Sahni from McKinsey and colleague David Cutler from Harvard estimated up to $360 billion of immediate opportunities that AI can save money in health care. When I asked for examples of how this capability is driving consolidation in digital health, it reminded me that just last week, Transcarent–an AI-native care navigation company, acquired Accolade, a once-ascendent, more traditional care navigation company whose stock has recently waned.

Like any technology, A.I. can be wielded for good or for evil. I can’t help being optimistic however. Healthcare is a notoriously calcified industry and I believe these technologies enable well-positioned innovators to give the industry the kick in the pants it has long had coming.

3. The year mainstream clinicians embrace social media–and (perhaps) men embrace clinicians.

My final prediction from last year was that “misinformation will rise, as will the burden of proof for good data.” Both clauses of this thesis proved unfortunately true.

Surveys continue to show that most Americans regularly encounter health misinformation online—and aren’t sure when it is true or not. Studies also find that Gen Zers name TikTok as their primary news source, and that more than 50% use the platform specifically for health advice. At Maven, our own published research showed that nearly 60% of TikTok videos under the hashtag “trying to conceive” contained misinformation, while only 27% of the videos were made by health care professionals.

Outside of select medical influencers, most mainstream clinicians have been dismissive and reluctant to engage with social media, despite its merits in helping people feel seen and heard. Yet in speaking to experts, I was encouraged to find that the tide may be turning. Afterall, misinformation is a public health concern that shows up in the doctor’s office–and it is best addressed when doctors also show up in the public square.

Legacy media and legacy healthcare organizations are now actively revising their social media strategies for the new age, particularly as the platforms themselves step back from third-party fact-checking. Like many, I’m concerned about the degree of information distortion we will continue to face in this new era. But I’m also hopeful that by stepping outside of the clinic and communicating through people’s personal devices, clinicians may begin to regain some of the trust that has been steadily receding in recent years.

I’m particularly hopeful about what this may mean for men. I know, hear me out. Men, despite having a healthcare delivery system that is largely biased to their benefit, are much more reluctant than women to engage with it in the first place.

In the current state, absent a meaningful medical presence, social media seems to take all of men’s worst instincts—our distrust of authority, our reluctance to speak to a therapist, our disdain for primary care—and route them towards nonsense: supplements they don’t need, for problems they don’t have, often while ignoring the concrete changes that could improve their overall health and quality of life. A new survey out soon from Maven found that 83% of men have no idea where to turn for male-specific reproductive health support.

But with more connected doctors perhaps we can guide men towards better paths. And of course better health for men is good for women too. My eyes are peeled for efforts that meaningfully brings everyone to the party.

What my team is reading, considering, and building against.

• Our hearts go out to the communities impacted by the fires in Southern California that continue to burn. The devastation is hard to watch. I have been heartened, though, by the chorus of support from all over the world. I particularly loved this piece about Watch Duty, a nonprofit-run wildfire tracking app that is a perfect example of technology at its best.

• In important news you may have missed, Ron Shinkman at Fertility Bridge examined the class-action lawsuits against biotech companies selling pregenetic implantation testing for embryos (also known as PGT). The defendants claim the companies oversold the effectiveness of the testing in order to inflate their own profits–and that such testing exposed their blastocysts to risk of damage.
  
  Some of those who administer fertility benefits also benefit from unnecessary procedures and have positioned PGT rates as a performance metric. In doing this, they have sustained the false assumption that “the higher, the better.” At Maven, we are watching these lawsuits keenly, and glad to see energy for change.

• In an op-ed for the NYT, my college friend and brilliant columnist Jessica Grose raises the inverse question of something we ask often in women’s health—how does a dearth of research lead not just to underdiagnosing, but overdiagnosing? The condition in question here happens to be PCOS, and perhaps to nobody’s surprise, TikTok plays a large role in disseminating and inflating mistruths about it.

• A win worth celebrating: soon medical debt will no longer be included in credit reports, granting an estimated 15 million people some peace of mind!