Covering more than 78 million Americans, Delta Dental operates one of the largest dental plan administrators in the United States. Over the past 70 years, Delta Dental has created innovative, data-driven technology that increases quality of care while decreasing customer costs.

As an insurance company, Delta Dental continuously compiles and analyzes insurance data to build better plans that decrease costs to their customers and partners. This is achieved through the General RAte Calculation Environment (GRACE), which enables insurance data to be processed efficiently.

Our GRACE Shell enables users to streamline their development inside of Delta Dental’s vast ecosystem of tools with an emphasis on utility and accessibility.

Our command line interface offers a powerful but simple tool to enable fast prototyping, testing, and debugging across the complex rate calculation domain. Programs can be run, tested, and debugged quickly through intuitive commands. Furthermore, the simplicity of our software enables non-technical users, such as actuaries or underwriters, to easily navigate and build models.

The GRACE shell creates an environment where users can dynamically build their prototypes. As the user develops, they can easily create, undo, load, save and share their work in a responsive and robust environment.

Our system facilitates simple building and testing of GRACE programs, enabling non-technical users to develop software quickly without prior training, saving time and cutting costs.

The front end of our software is built in Java, utilizing the Picocli command line interface framework and Maven project management software. The back end uses Delta Dental’s existing core libraries containing fundamental calculation algorithms and data structures.