Affordable dentistry remains a pressing issue across the United States (US). With over 75 million Americans (comprising 23% of the population) lacking dental insurance, and a staggering 96% experiencing tooth decay by age 65, it's evident that a substantial portion of the population faces barriers to accessing essential dental care.

"Our mission is to democratize dental care in the United States" — Alex Stogdon, Product Owner

The statistics paint a vivid picture of the urgent need for accessible and affordable dental plans. As dental issues continue to affect millions of Americans, there's a growing imperative to bridge the gap and ensure that quality dental care is within reach for all individuals, regardless of their insurance status or socioeconomic background.

In 2021, Altogether Dental (a Haleon-owned product) approached Skillwork to support them with their new product, which included testing product viability to solve such a pressing and growing problem in the US, all whilst remaining compliant with HIPPA and HiTRUST, a complex regulatory framework.

A little more about the task at hand: 

Use Case: Dental care is unaffordable for the majority of people in the United States, and affordable solutions are pretty much non-existent.

Challenges for Altogether Dental: Haleon had a hunch that there would be a market for their digital product, Altogether Dental, but wanted to validate this quickly, and in a costly manner through ‘smoke tests’ using landing pages to test the product viability.

The Solution

Understanding the business: To unravel the core challenges of Altogether Dental, working closely with the founders of Altogether Dental without encroaching on their time was critical. Soon after, Skillwork was able to establish a robust communication framework to ensure direct lines between founders, product managers and the development team via Slack. This transparent and seamless mode of communication was paramount to the success of collaborating with a corporate giant like Haloeon.

Fast execution: Recognising the urgency of market speed and armed with insights from System-Two's customer journey, Skillwork structured the project into sprints, enabling early platform testing even before feature completion. Throughout these sprints, Skillwork remained flexible so that they could accommodate the evolving requirements from dental plan service providers and customer feedback, ensuring adaptability to dynamic needs.

Our technical approach: Simultaneously, Skillwork’s certified Azure specialists and business experts meticulously crafted HIPAA-compliant server architecture, business processes and facilitated a business associate agreement with Microsoft, all the whilst expediting speed-to-market by eliminating the current communication bottlenecks.

Outcome: Skillwork’s analysis resulted in the creation of a subscription service which provided patients with (up to) 50% discounts at over 300,000 dentists across the U.S. Altogether Dental is now Haleon’s leading digital product and has signed deals with the likes of Anderson's Merchandising.

Ongoing support: As the project culminated, Skillwork implemented a comprehensive testing framework, swiftly addressing any lingering issues. With resources in place for rapid feature deployment based on early user data, the team continues to support Altogether Dental, exploring further platform iterations and providing strategic technical guidance.