When Sarah Chavarria talks about the future of healthcare, she starts in a place many people overlook: the dentist’s chair. Oral health, she argues, is not a standalone service but an entry point into broader preventive care.

“What if we reframe that dental visit as part of preventative health and really invite the dentists to play that role in a new way?” she says on CEO: Behind the Scenes.

Early intervention

Chavarria, who serves as CEO and President of Delta Dental of California, believes the dental visit presents one of the most overlooked opportunities in the healthcare system. She points to a revealing pattern in patient behavior.

“We know that 27 million Americans don’t go to their primary care physician, but they go to their dentist twice a year,” she points out.

For her, this gap underscores the potential for dental professionals to contribute meaningfully to early detection and whole-person wellbeing.

A central part of this transformation is the partnership on an innovation clinic in Oakland, designed to test dental–medical integration in practice. When the clinic opened in late October, its purpose became clear almost immediately as the first 60 patients revealed significant, and in some cases urgent, health concerns.

Among them was a woman whose routine blood pressure check uncovered a dangerously high reading. She was referred to urgent care, and later that day, she phoned the clinic to share that the dentists’ intervention had likely prevented a life-threatening episode.

For Chavarria, these kinds of moments cut to the heart of why the clinic exists and why the work feels so meaningful to her.

“That’s why I feel compelled to come to work and innovate and think about how we make that possible for all patients to experience at their dentists?” she says.

Inside the organization, Chavarria leads by cultivating curiosity and encouraging people to challenge established approaches.

She sees her role as creating space for ideas to emerge rather than dictating solutions.

“I don’t bring a lot of answers, I bring the questions,” she says.

This philosophy led her to assemble ‘tiger teams’ of high-potential employees from across Delta Dental and give them 180 days to imagine the company’s strategic direction for 2030. By day 60, she says, each team had already surfaced valuable insights, with her approach driven by Chavarria’s ambition to embed oral health more deeply into the broader healthcare ecosystem and to equip future leaders to carry the work forward.

“I think the legacy is that our brand has another incredible 70 years ahead of it, where we are celebrated as having had the imagination to really close this gap between oral health and overall health,” she says. “Nothing would delight me more.”

Listen to the latest episode of our CEO: Behind the Scenes podcast with Sarah Chavarria on Amazon, Apple or Spotify.