Launched during the height of the dot.com boom, DentalPlans.com was founded by an e-commerce entrepreneur and the son of a dentist. They had a shared company vision — to find a way to leverage the Internet to help people access affordable dental care.

Unlike many other companies founded then, DentalPlans.com not only survived — it thrived, in part to its use of technology to deliver outstanding healthcare savings to consumers. This commitment to people-focused innovation is a case study feature in Toggle, a business-to-business trade journal.

“We’ve leveraged technology from a platform perspective,”; said DentalPlans.com CEO Bob Harris. “We’ve embraced the move to mobile. More broadly, we’ve embraced the move online. Now we are ready to accelerate our growth.”;

DentalPlans.com is now the largest online marketplace for dental savings plans in the U.S. And, the company continues to expand its offerings to include other money-saving ancillary benefits like telehealth, vision, hearing, acupuncture, fitness programs and more, Toggle notes.

Interest in traditional insurance alternatives is rapidly growing as healthcare costs rise. Educating consumers about available options from leading healthcare brands and providing helpful resources requires a robust technology ecosystem.

In 2015, DentalPlans.com moved from operating its own on-site servers to managed cloud services.  It was an important initiative, as managing and maintaining in-house servers was “time consuming, and distracted from business innovation,”; said Chief Technology Officer Barry Newman.

DentalPlans.com also transferred its call center phone system to a cloud-based platform, reducing its database footprint by 75 percent and cutting hosting costs by more than 40 percent. Now, the technology team can better focus on driving business initiatives to boost value for consumers.

The company recently released several technology-led initiatives, like click-to-call capabilities, its website in Spanish and BumblebeeMD.com, a consumer-focused telehealth service.

“The future is all about people accessing health information when they want it and how they want it,” said Newman.