Delivering on high security standards and great UX for 9+ user types
Delta Dental of California and affiliates help connect and standardize dental services across the state to bring quality dental care to millions. Their core goal is advancing the overall health of their customers, partners, and consumers. Keeping that promise means constantly working to maintain strict compliance, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s (HIPAA) zero-tolerance requirements, while ensuring a streamlined, intuitive experience for every consumer
Delta Dental of California knew that exceeding these expectations meant using technology solutions and working with partners that could grow alongside their evolving business. The organization serves an ecosystem of over 11 million users across a complex, on-prem and hybrid cloud environment. These users include everyone from members to brokers, enterprise care providers, dental facilities, and more. “We need to give every user, no matter their place in our ecosystem, a consistent, low-friction customer experience,” says Diane Titus, director of platform engineering. To meet their wide range of user needs, Delta Dental of California built a disconnected series of customer identity solutions. While these disconnected solutions worked for end users, they required manual upkeep from Delta Dental of California’s team, and their custom solutions struggled to scale along with their business as they continued to add hundreds of thousands of users per month.
Selecting an identity partner to rapidly overhaul identity
Titus and her team saw an opportunity to standardize their customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions with Okta Customer Identity. “We chose Okta because we wanted to streamline the experience for our users and our application teams,” she says. “Okta is also a pivotal player in the identity industry, and it’s critical that we work alongside technology leaders to meet our own goals and maintain HIPAA compliance.”
For Delta Dental of California, easing their application teams’ workloads meant providing standard but flexible identity tools that would allow them to make improvements quickly, reduce cost, and improve their disaster recovery resiliency. “It would take us 10 years of work to fully rewrite and modernize our applications to meet new standards, and we simply don’t have that time,” Titus adds.
One recent and urgent change on the company’s to-do list was being able to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) across their applications. As MFA and other identity features become compliance requirements, the team needs tools that help them pivot quickly. “Having an identity solution that was flexible enough to modify without sacrificing standardization was non-negotiable,” Titus shares. “Okta offered a secure, user-friendly solution that we knew would help us keep to our compliance deadlines.”
Using identity as the foundation for digital transformation
Delta Dental of California began their Okta journey by integrating a new CIAM solution across their tech stack and migrating users behind the scenes. By centralizing identity for both their legacy technologies and newer cloud applications, Delta Dental of California immediately simplified IT operations. “We’ve decommissioned our legacy authentication technologies and servers and now have one identity platform. We’ve both improved our agility and substantially reduced our operational overhead. It’s a win-win,” Titus says.
By simplifying identity management work, the team has been able to better focus on rolling out new features for their end users, such as Multi-Factor Authentication. “Making it simple for our users to access their accounts has improved user retention and means that as we add hundreds of thousands of new users, we can trust their experiences will remain consistent and reliable,” Titus shares. “Without Okta, that growth rate would be flattened because we would have to design new solutions to keep up. For example, we implemented MFA in just six months with Okta. Without it, we never would’ve finished in time, and that would’ve jeopardized our compliance and led to huge fines.”
The team is also using Workflows to gradually integrate new features to minimize impacts on their support teams. “Since we can queue Workflows to deploy new features in batches, we can roll out new features incrementally without compromising our call center at all,” she says. These wins have caught the attention of the larger Delta Dental Plans Association which is now considering Okta for their own identity needs. Meanwhile, Delta Dental of California is focusing on improving security and customization options for their users. “Our next goal is to give our providers the ability to customize their own look and feel for their members,” Titus shares. By helping users standardize, the organization continues to expand a secure, easy-to-use identity foundation to support millions.
About Customer
Delta Dental of California connects and standardizes dental services across the state to bring quality dental care to millions. Their core goal is advancing the overall health of their customers, partners, and consumers and provide groups and individuals with quality, cost-effective dental insurance.
