Giving her Word

As a Chief People Officer in the healthcare industry, working for companies such as Optum360 and NantHealth, the primary focus of Sarah Chavarria’s role involved identifying the competencies and talent the business needed to drive change.

Seven years ago, when she joined Delta Dental in the same capacity, the script looked familiar.

“Delta Dental was a largely successful organization, but not really positioned for transformation,” she tells The CEO Magazine. “That’s why I came in to help the board and the executive team really do all the things one does as a Chief People Officer.”

So impressed was the board by her that, by August 2022, she had been appointed President. In January of this year, CEO was also added to her title, making her the first female to hold this position in the organization.

“Until then, I had always used my skills to facilitate and influence others,” she says. “And here I was now leading how we operate and grow our business.”

Strong Foundations

Today Delta Dental of California and Affiliates covers over 45 million people across 15 states, plus Washington DC, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. On the provider side, three out of four dentists in the country are part of the Delta Dental Network – or “just north of 70,000 providers”, Chavarria says.

“Delta Dental is a pretty big brand – I was a customer long before I was an employee,” she continues. As health care in the country continues to shift towards a patient-centric model with electronic health records, she adds that “transitioning from that position of strength is incredible”.

The last five years have been what she refers to as a period of “strengthening the foundation”.

“In my first several weeks at Delta Dental, I left the corporate office to meet with employees,” she explains. “I held round tables and one-on-ones. I also asked everyone one question: if this was an organization you wanted to stay at, have your friends and family work at, invite your kids to work, tell your neighbors about, who would we be?”

She brought those nuggets of information back to her desk and let them settle before distilling them into what would become the organization’s purpose: improving health by providing access to quality care.

“Delta Dental had a great opportunity to shape a purpose and become that purposeful organization,” she says. “At the heart of our transformation was the answer to that one question I asked all employees.”

Harnessing Innovation

A big part of these new foundations, she explains, have involved harnessing innovation to better understand customer needs. “We’re a 68-year-old organization, we have an incredible brand, which I love, but we also have an opportunity to think about how we change how we do our work,” she says.

Those changes take a variety of forms: moving from waterfall to agile methodology, rolling out cloud-based applications across the business and introducing more self-service tools for its patients and providers.

The focus of her first 60 days in the CEO seat involved being hyper-focused on the right things, not more things. “In the portfolio of things that we could work on, from multi-product billing to CRM for providers, it’s about finding the opportunities that are going to help us deliver value to our stakeholder ecosystem the best,” she says.

But it’s been longer than just two months that Chavarria has been using data to integrate dental and medical services to focus on a person’s health as a whole. “Going to the dentist isn’t just about a cleaning, a wider smile or a dental check. It’s an oral health check,” she says.

After all, she adds, people go to the dentist twice a year, but they might only go to their primary care physician once a year. “That’s two healthcare checkpoints that they’re getting with a healthcare professional that could point to a whole host of other things,” she continues.

A Different Perspective

Taking the insights drawn from data – and the surveys conducted that are complementary to it – Chavarria is striking up conversations with other executives in the healthcare space as she looks for the opportunities to bring awareness and a different perspective to Delta Dental’s products.

“We know through our data insights and through where we sit in this industry that oral health is the key to what comes next,” she says.

As such, the company has recently collaborated with the American Heart Association on the Health Smiles, Healthy Hearts initiative.

“An oral health check can point to early indications of heart disease and this unique collaboration brings attention to the vital role routine dental visits and proper oral care have on the impact of overall health,” she says.

There’s also the opportunity to engage in conversation with the 84 percent of women in the United States who are not aware of the connection between menopause and oral health and symptoms such as cavities and gum disease.

“Our data-backed study on the link between menopause and oral health found this incredible opportunity for us to bring awareness to our patients and our providers,” she says.

Such an approach all feeds into one of Chaviarra’s top priorities as CEO: the relationship between Delta Dental and its providers. “They are the most prominent stakeholder we have in our ecosystem because they deliver care,” she says.

“By collaborating with our providers, we can define what quality care means and work together to create the best overall healthcare experience for our patients,” she says. After all, providers are the delivery of care. “Our job is to provide access,” she adds.

“Together, we need to connect people to the health care they deserve.”