Reduces time for front-line Business Assistant staff to find answers to questions from minutes to seconds with an AI chatbot
Frees staff to focus more on patients by automating administrative tasks
Improves cost-efficiency when scaling data analytics for terabytes of data
Accelerated deployment of AI initiatives
Heartland Dental achieves better scalability and analytics performance by complementing its extensive SAP environments with Google Cloud and integrating AI solutions with Vertex AI. These moves help supported practices empower front-line staff, improving job satisfaction and enhancing patient experiences.
Heartland Dental achieves better scalability and analytics performance by complementing its extensive SAP environments with Google Cloud and integrating AI solutions with Vertex AI. These moves help supported practices empower front-line staff, improving job satisfaction and enhancing patient experiences.
Supporting doctors and enhancing patient care
After eight years of intensive study at a university and dental school, dentists are typically excited to start working with patients and improving their health—not filling out paperwork. Heartland Dental was founded to support doctors and their teams by reducing their administrative burden, giving dentists the freedom to focus more on patient care. The company supports over 3,000 dentists across more than 1,800 practices, helping with everything from HR, accounting, and payroll to marketing and business growth.
One of the ways that Heartland Dental supports doctors is by turning terabytes of operational data into actionable insights. These insights help affiliated dental practices achieve operational excellence and growth while maintaining the highest quality of patient care. None of this is possible without technology environments that enable scale while providing high levels of data privacy and security protections.
Heartland Dental decided its best bet was to leverage the scale and flexibility of the cloud, complementing its SAP Cloud environments with Google Cloud technology.
The partnership between Google Cloud and SAP gives us the best of both worlds, combining SAP’s data processing with Google Cloud’s flexibility to do more for the dental practices we support.
Robert Jerome
Chief Digital Officer, Heartland Dental
Unlocking data potential with Google Cloud and SAP
The partnership between SAP and Google Cloud stood out to Heartland Dental as it presented an opportunity to leverage the technical capabilities from both companies in a common enterprise data strategy. Google Cloud Cortex Framework provides a model and reference architecture to help unlock SAP HANA data for analytics and, in the future, will help lay the foundation for data integration between Google and SAP applications, including S/4 HANA public cloud.
Heartland Dental began its migration to a Google Cloud environment by moving teams into BigQuery by providing supported practices with advanced analytics for marketing, payor analytics, and other needs. With Google Cloud, Heartland Dental can easily expand environments and add capabilities to support new cloud projects.
Developers can create modern mobile apps in the cloud with less development time. The company also has plans to move a homegrown master data management system for supported practices into Google Cloud, accelerating data performance shared across numerous applications.
Google Cloud plays a big role in our cloud strategy for supported practices. It offers an opportunity to continue to scale analytics at a lower rate of spend.
Robert Jerome
Chief Digital Officer, Heartland Dental
While Google Cloud provides greater scale, cost-efficiency, and data analytic performance, Heartland Dental also views the shift away from on-premises environments as necessary to continue to improve security for supported practices.
“We want to make sure we’re using the latest database encryptions, protecting data at rest and in motion, and keeping private patient and operational data secure for the doctors we support,” says Jerome. “It’s good to have a partner in Google Cloud that takes security as seriously as we do.”
Empowering front-line staff with AI
Heartland Dental is actively leveraging Vertex AI to enhance operational efficiency in numerous use cases, including reviews of supported practices, complex doctor contracts, and leasing agreements. The company is also using Vertex AI to implement AI agents that make life easier for front-line office staff.
We’re only scratching the surface of what AI can do for supported doctors and their teams, but Vertex AI is already helping us build momentum by making it so easy to deploy.
Robert Jerome
Chief Digital Officer, Heartland Dental
Business Assistants (BA) in dental practices handle all administrative interactions with patients. Heartland Dental offers supported dental practices Heartbeat Engage, its version of SAP Work Zone that combines up to 40 critical applications into a single user interface. With the addition of the AI agent powered by Vertex AI, BAs can ask how to complete complex tasks through a chat agent, rather than needing to sift through pages of lengthy documentation. This can potentially transform a five-minute search into a five-second answer.
Initial feedback on the AI agent has been extremely positive, with supported practices praising Heartland Dental for how the agent simplifies complex tasks, improves job satisfaction, and ultimately enhances care by allowing staff to prioritize patient interactions.
Embracing technology that supports dental practices
Heartland Dental embraces technology, but its goal always remains focused on supporting dental practices. New technologies need to have an impact on the doctors and their teams we support, allowing them to automate mundane and repetitive tasks, more time to focus on patients, and grow their businesses. Continued investment in Google Cloud will be pivotal as Heartland Dental embraces its cloud strategy for growth.
“We have a strong foundation to expand SAP, accelerate modern app deployment, and implement AI to automate tasks and support staff,” says Jerome. “I think the future is bright with Google Cloud.”
Heartland Dental is the largest dental support organization in the United States, supporting over 3,000 dentists across more than 1,800 practices in 39 states. Its core mission is to support doctors and their teams as they deliver the highest quality dental care and experiences to the communities they serve, helping to alleviate administrative burdens and empowering dentists to focus on what matters most – their patients.
Industries: Healthcare
Location: United States
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Vertex AI
