Delta Dental is the largest dental system in the United States, which operates two of the nation’s largest networks of participating dentists. Delta Dental provides dental and orthodontic coverage to more than 78 million people in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and other U.S territories, including small businesses, government entities, and professional organizations of all kinds.

Underwriting is the process of how Delta Dental determines the best dental insurance plan for their clients. In addition to crafting insurance plans for new clients, underwriters also spend a significant amount of time recommending benefit changes for current customers. This time-consuming process requires aggregating data from several sources and significant domain knowledge to properly recommend benefit updates.

Our Smart Dental Benefit Recommendation Engine helps automate the underwriting process to improve benefits for customers and save underwriters time.

Our system uses machine learning to look at historical data to help determine the best insurance plan for a given individual or family. Based on this analysis, our system recommends additions or reductions to the customer’s current plan.

Our web dashboard aggregates all of the information needed by underwriters in one convenient location, including the benefit changes recommended by our machine learning model.

Using our system, Delta Dental underwriters can offer customers faster and more efficient service, and it allows them to focus their valuable time on more important issues.

The recommendation and prediction algorithms are written in Python in Jupyter Notebook, the web application is written in ReactJS. Our data is hosted on Snowflake from Delta Dental’s Microsoft Azure databases. Docker is used to containerize our engine and host it on Microsoft Azure.