The president of Delta Dental Plan of Colorado, Kathryn Paul, says there is a major misunderstanding about the impact oral health has on one’s general wellbeing. The misunderstanding is so widespread that many employers across the state of Colorado don’t—or can’t—offer dental insurance to their employees. But with an IT overhaul and a new sales and marketing strategy, Paul and her team are looking to change that.

“Our main challenge is getting the general public, policy makers, and the medical provider community to understand how dental disease works, why oral health is important, how it is connected to general physical health. A lot of people don’t realize that tooth decay is an infection, and it is more prevalent than asthma in children.

IT makeover
As in any industry, the right technological investments can make all the difference. In 2005, nonprofit Delta Dental underwent an IT overhaul that allowed the company to take 25 full-time equivalents out of the workforce and process nearly 1.5 million claims with 99.6% accuracy. The vendor Delta Dental had previously done business with decided not to support the product any longer, so Delta Dental of Michigan stepped up to the plate, which made for the smoothest IT transition Paul has seen in her 36-year healthcare career.

With Delta Dental of Michigan as the new system vendor, Delta Dental of Colorado decided to grasp the opportunity to form other types of relationships with the sister company. For example, Delta Dental of Michigan has taken on the company’s actuarial and underwriting processes.

“We put about two years into planning this project, and our partners in Michigan were incredibly helpful in the implementation process. We put a lot of emphasis on change management because it transformed the entire company,” Paul said. “In addition to the systems oriented work, we focused our energy on the people part of the equation. We realized that if we did not focus on our people, the implementation wouldn’t be successful.”

Paul and her team made sure employees had access to the proper training and education, stress management programs, work groups, and opportunities to express themselves throughout the implementation. “We recognized people for their contributions regularly, and we even brought in massage therapists to perform chair massages for a few months.”

Playing team sports
With the IT implementation underway, Delta Dental of Colorado started an initiative to strengthen the capabilities of the sales and marketing departments. The program, Sales is a Team Sport, brings people from all departments together once a quarter to learn what it takes to sell to and retain a good customer, thus breaking down any silos.

“Every department—from HR to billing to claims processing—has one thing in common: satisfying the customer. This program is important for us because a lot of people didn’t understand their relationship to sales and marketing departments or how they contributed to the growth of the company,” said the president. “As the industry gets more and more competitive, upgrading the skills of the people in sales to make them more consultative is critical.”

Sales is a Team Sport is part of a larger program called Growing Together, which Delta Dental has had in place for several years. Each year, the company chooses a different topic of focus, this year’s being sales and marketing. With a new VP of sales and marketing, the company has been able to strengthen its relationships with its brokers and group customers and renewed its two largest accounts: the state of Colorado and the University of Colorado.

Seeing the future
Delta Dental is looking to branch out into other product lines to ensure as many Coloradans as possible receive dental care. Out of the 4.3 million state residents, the company serves a million of them, and Paul said that 86% of employers in the state are small businesses, many of which have trouble offering employees a wide array of benefits.

“We’re focusing on areas where we can offer products to people who are not currently able to get dental benefits, so we’ve been introducing new products—voluntary products, patient direct programs, small group work, etc. Figuring out ways to make these products attractive to those kinds of employers is essential to the oral health of our members,” Paul said.

In addition, Delta Dental is in the process of adding vision coverage to its portfolio. It has formed a partnership with Eyemed that allows any subscriber of Delta Dental to receive automatic discounted arrangements at all Eyemed outlets such as Pearl Vision or Lens Crafters. “We are in the process of wrapping up the sale of our first insured vision product through Eyemed. We are branching out into other benefit lines, not by building the networks, but by creating strategic alliances so that we can provide those services and benefits to our customers. A lot of employers provide dental and vision already, so to be able to get them from one source is valuable,” she concluded.