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How Delta Dental of Washington inspired collaboration with easy-to-use technology

Delta Dental of Washington
Seattle, Washington

Delta Dental

Challenge

Video con­fer­enc­ing has long been an option for com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton, but com­pli­cat­ed and incon­sis­tent tech­nol­o­gy from room to room result­ed in low adop­tion and dif­fi­cul­ty col­lab­o­rat­ing from dif­fer­ent locations.

Results

Neurilink part­nered with Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton to devel­op tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions that mar­ried Zoom’s ease-of-use with trust­ed hard­ware, increas­ing video con­fer­enc­ing use to almost 700 hours per month at the Seat­tle office.

Setting The Stage For Greater Connectivity

Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton is a leader in dis­rupt­ing, trans­form­ing and rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the oral health indus­try. Since their begin­ning in 1954, when den­tal x‑rays were $10 and clean­ings were $5, they’ve been remov­ing bar­ri­ers to oral health care and pow­er­ing healthy smiles.

Fast for­ward 60 years, Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton found itself in need of a mod­ern work­place envi­ron­ment to bet­ter serve patients. Their lega­cy video con­fer­enc­ing sys­tem was hard-to use, anti­quat­ed, and made remote col­lab­o­ra­tion a bur­den. Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton want­ed to update their work­place tech­nol­o­gy to improve con­nec­tiv­i­ty between employ­ees and busi­ness partners.

Delta Dental of Washington

A Legacy System Impacts Business

Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton had expe­ri­ence with video col­lab­o­ra­tion. How­ev­er, it was only used by a hand­ful of employ­ees because of three main issues.

Unre­li­able Con­fer­enc­ing: All com­pa­ny meet­ings were a major pro­duc­tion, with AV sup­port teams at each loca­tion in case some­thing went wrong.

Com­pli­cat­ed and Lim­it­ed Tech­nol­o­gy: The sys­tems were com­plex and the log in process was so com­pli­cat­ed few employ­ees used it. The video con­fer­enc­ing that did exist was lim­it­ed to inter­nal con­fer­enc­ing and didn’t con­nect to exter­nal partners.

Incon­sis­tent Expe­ri­ence: Each room worked dif­fer­ent­ly due to incon­sis­tent tech­nol­o­gy and hard­ware. Some rooms had access to video con­fer­enc­ing while oth­ers didn’t, which meant the expe­ri­ence wasn’t the same for employ­ees from room to room.

AV fun

Finding the Right Solution

The ques­tion wasn’t just how to make a room usable, it was how to make peo­ple want to use it.

Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton moved to a new loca­tion in Seattle’s South Lake Union neigh­bor­hood. They want­ed to find a part­ner who would help design tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions for col­lab­o­ra­tion and meet­ing spaces.

The team start­ed by using a Design Think­ing approach to immerse them­selves in the prob­lem. They inter­viewed a range of employ­ees to under­stand the cur­rent user expe­ri­ence, what worked, and what didn’t. From that, they were able to cap­ture three main pri­or­i­ties for the new solution.

  1. It had to work consistently
  2. It had to be easy to use
  3. It need­ed to make col­lab­o­ra­tion intuitive

Delta Den­tal of Wash­ing­ton select­ed Blue Sky (now Neurilink) as the audio visu­al part­ner for the project. Blue Sky devel­oped solu­tions for hud­dle rooms, large con­fer­ence rooms, design stu­dios, incu­ba­tors and oth­er spaces which fea­tured an easy-to-use, con­sis­tent experience.

The team chose the Zoom meet­ing solu­tion which Blue Sky inte­grat­ed with the nec­es­sary dis­plays, micro­phones, speak­ers, cam­eras and inter­face. The added hard­ware enabled the sys­tem to scale up for large con­fer­ence rooms or down for hud­dle spaces. Blue Sky lever­aged tech­nol­o­gy from Cre­stron, Phoenix Audio, Shure, Sharp and Log­itech to cre­ate a pos­i­tive user expe­ri­ence regard­less of room size.

The Results

The con­fer­enc­ing tech­nol­o­gy con­sis­tent­ly works, whether a con­fer­ence room is con­nect­ing with par­tic­i­pants on a com­put­er, a phone, or anoth­er con­fer­ence room.

Across the board the sys­tems seam­less­ly sync with Out­look and fea­ture one-touch con­nec­tions. Every­one can con­nect and share wire­less­ly with­out the need to login to a computer.

Final­ly, every room oper­ates in the same way. There’s no dif­fer­ence between the expe­ri­ences in a hud­dle room and large con­fer­ence room.

The AV project team took a well thought out, delib­er­ate approach to upgrad­ing the audio visu­al tech­nol­o­gy result­ing in more col­lab­o­ra­tion regard­less of loca­tion.  The project was so suc­cess­ful they’re plan­ning on rolling out sim­i­lar solu­tions at satel­lite offices through­out Washington.

Multiuse space- web