Beyond dashboards: Predictive models that actually improve patient experience

Healthcare administrators are no strangers to dashboards. Nearly every department, team, and provider group relies on visual summaries to track performance, whether it’s RVUs, patient satisfaction scores, or revenue per visit. But what if dashboards could go beyond reporting the past and start predicting the future?

In their 2025 MGMA Summit presentation, Practical Data Solutions’ Scott Everitt, MBA, VP of Healthcare Solutions, and Russell Hendrickson, president and CEO, pulled back the curtain on predictive analytics models that can help practices look ahead — particularly in areas such as access, no-show risk, and patient throughput.

“We want to improve patient experience overall,” Everitt said. “That’s the big thing that everybody is seeking right now, because when you [are] improving the patient experience, everything else really kind of falls into place.”

The limits of traditional reporting

Traditional dashboards are largely retrospective. They tell leaders what happened — last month, last quarter, last fiscal year — and are often used as compliance tools or for performance audits. They answer, “How did we do?” but not, “What can we do next?” By the time a problem surfaces in the data, the window to act often may have already closed.

“We don’t want to just report data. We want to model it and simulate different decisions,” Hendrickson explained. “And that changes the whole mindset, from compliance to strategy.”

The presenters shared a five-step model for turning static reporting into predictive power:

1. Define the population.
2. Stratify by performance.
3. Benchmark to a goal.
4. Model the impact of improvement.
5. Measure whether the gains were realized.

To illustrate, they started with a non-clinical analogy: a sunflower field. The fields are stratified by yield. Then, underperforming rows are benchmarked against high-performing ones, and predictive models estimate the outcome if the low-yield areas improve.