Research methodology and status
A public standard for reviewable forecasts.
NextConsensus separates public evidence from assessment and outcome. A forecast names a defined public transition, fixes the evidence available at a stated cutoff, and remains reviewable after the outcome is known. The public record shows the rules and commitments; program-specific context stays private.
Where things stand
Capability status
Available now
Claim-trajectory reconstruction. Refract reconstructs how medical claims emerge, change wording, acquire evidence, persist or disappear, and spread across influential sources — from dated public revision history.
Every event is traceable to a public source with a reproducible hash.
In validation
Claim prioritization. Signals of movement can be organized into a review queue, with the evidence and limits shown alongside the ranking.
Available as a review workflow; performance claims remain subject to the published evaluation record.
Research program
Authority-transition forecasting. A research program for defined guideline, regulatory, and coverage transitions. Its records are registered before outcomes and evaluated when they resolve.
Prospective performance is published only after the relevant records resolve.
What comes before what
The ladder
Evidence climbs from first publication through replication and expert consensus to the moment an institution acts. We register forecasts against the institutional end of that ladder — a guideline body, a regulator or a payer acting in public — because those are the rungs where something dated happens that anyone can check. A registered probability is a statement under a stated question, a stated evidence cutoff and a stated resolution rule, and that record today holds no resolved forecasts; read the number with the procedure attached, or not at all. The ladder guide gives each of the twelve rungs its signals and its role.
Forecast anatomy
Three things, kept apart
What the record showed, what we estimated from it, and what the authority actually did are three separate things. Keeping them apart is what makes scoring honest — blur any two and you can no longer tell a good call from a lucky one.
Proposition design
What makes a question answerable
A forecast starts with a defined public transition: the authority, action, deadline, evidence cutoff, and resolution source are stated before the outcome is known. Questions that cannot be settled from the declared public record are declined.
The public action and responsible authority are specific enough for an independent reader to identify.
The evidence cutoff and resolution deadline are fixed before the forecast is evaluated.
A source and rule are named in advance so the outcome can be checked without relying on our judgment.
Temporal integrity
Keeping hindsight out
The easiest way to look good at forecasting is to let information from after the fact leak into the estimate. Every probability is pinned to a dated evidence state to make that impossible, and each registration stands on its own rather than borrowing from the ones before it.
All sources included in the forecast are frozen at the evidence cutoff date. Evidence that arrives after this date is excluded. The cutoff is recorded in the registration and cannot be modified.
Once registered, the forecast — its probability, baseline, sources, and proposition — is locked. No edits, no backfills, no silent corrections. The registration hash is the record. See how to verify one on the <a href="/verification/">verification page</a>.
If a source is updated after registration, the original version is preserved in the forecast record. The forecast scores against the original evidence state, not the current one.
When we forecast the same thing twice
The same question can be forecast more than once, at different cutoffs or against different deadlines. Each of those is its own registration, scored on its own, against the evidence that existed when it was made. A later estimate never rescues an earlier one, and an earlier one never gets credit for what a later one got right.
Reference forecasts
How results stay interpretable
A probability is not meaningful on its own. Public evaluation compares it with declared reference approaches and states the cohort and time boundary alongside any result.
A transparent reference drawn from comparable historical outcomes.
A pre-specified alternative recorded alongside the forecast for a fair comparison.
A separate assessment using the same public record and resolution standard.
Outcome adjudication
Who decides what happened
A resolver with no stake in the forecast takes the rule we published before the horizon opened and applies it to the source documents. Their job is narrow on purpose: they do not weigh evidence and they do not touch probabilities. They read what the authority published and say whether it meets the rule.
The authority enacted the defined public transition within the stated horizon, with the confirming source cited.
The horizon closed without the defined transition, and the outcome is checked against the stated public source.
A related or unclear action is handled by the pre-stated rule rather than forced into a yes or no.
Evaluation
How the scoring works
Each registration is scored against the resolved public outcome using a pre-declared rule. Historical reconstruction and prospective results remain separate, because they answer different questions.
A pre-declared scoring rule rewards honest probabilities rather than hindsight-shaped numbers.
Published results will show whether forecast probabilities match observed frequencies in the evaluated cohort.
Forecast results are shown beside declared reference approaches so readers can judge incremental value.
Any lead-time result is reported with the precision, calibration, and alert burden needed to interpret it.
A transition that does not happen is classified by why — evidence, recognition, translation or procedure — rather than scored as a bare miss.
Published performance includes the cohort, denominator, unresolved and expired records, method version, and date range needed to read the result.
Core metric
Lead time, and why it is never reported alone
Any system can produce enormous lead time by calling everything early. What matters is how much warning you get at a level of precision you can actually act on, counting the false alarms it costs you. So lead time is always published alongside those figures, never on its own.
Lead time is reported only alongside the quality and alert burden of the underlying forecast.
The comparison point and observation rule are declared with the result, so lead time is not presented as a standalone advantage.
What is public, and what stays yours
The public record shows the general discipline: define the question, preserve the evidence boundary, and publish the evaluation standard. A program may add private decision context, but it does not change the public commitments or turn an unproven result into a guarantee.
Definitions, evidence boundaries, registration commitments, and results when they are ready to interpret.
Readers should be able to check the discipline without receiving a private program or customer context.
Decision context, customer priorities, and any non-public material supplied under the applicable agreement.
The public-source boundary, dated evidence state, independent resolution, and published limitations.
When we decline to forecast
A number attached to a record too thin to support it is a guess wearing a decimal point. When the public evidence will not carry an estimate, we say so and issue nothing. These are the conditions under which that happens.
When the public record cannot support a responsible estimate, the system declines rather than forcing a number.
When the available record supports more than one interpretation, the uncertainty is stated and the question may be declined.
When a necessary fact is not available in the declared public record, the dependency is identified instead of inferred.
When credible public sources disagree, the conflict remains visible and the record is not forced to a false resolution.
When a question falls outside the declared evidence or resolution boundary, the boundary is stated rather than claimed away.
Declining is on the record too
A forecaster who quietly skips the hard questions will look better than one who does not. So every decline is published with its reason and date, next to the scoring record. How often we pass is part of what you are judging us on.
Why the forecast was abstained: thin record, ambiguous edits, missing context, competing signals, or method boundary.
The specific evidence gap, ambiguity, or boundary that triggered the abstention. Stated precisely, not gestured at.
What the exclusion means for the scoring record. Abstained forecasts are not scored. They are recorded as abstained with the reason. The abstention rate is part of the method's public performance record.
Method basis
Why the method focuses on date, source, and limits.
These works frame the forecasting burden: evidence records age, guidelines change, and transparent scoring matters more than unsupported certainty.
- How quickly do systematic reviews go out of date? A survival analysis
Shows that review currency varies by topic and can decay before normal review schedules catch it.
- Validity of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality clinical practice guidelines: how quickly do guidelines become outdated?
Shows that guideline validity changes over time and should be reassessed against new evidence.
- GRADE: an emerging consensus on rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations
Separates evidence quality from the strength of recommendations and makes uncertainty explicit.
- The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews
Supports transparent reporting of search, selection, appraisal, synthesis, and update methods.