Pacific Dental Services (PDS) is one of the leading dental support organizations in the United States, supporting more than 625 dental offices in 19 states. Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Irvine, California, it employs over 9,900 team members, including 7,100 non-clinical employees and 2,800 clinicians. PDS has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies for 10 consecutive years and adds as many as 80 offices annually. Its Perfect Patient Experience operating model aims to free dentists to focus on dentistry.

Communications is a critical part of the operational infrastructure that PDS provides to its supported dental offices, and reliable telephony is the baseline. As Sr. VP and CIO David Baker put it, when someone picks up a phone it should work. That was not happening consistently with the company's previous communications solution, so Baker set out to find something better.

Basic telephony was only the starting point. PDS was scaling rapidly, adding up to 80 offices a year, and was using six different tools for video conferencing, which made for an inconsistent experience across offices. Leadership video calls were painful: people needed a VPN and a laptop to join, and it took around 10 minutes to connect a conference room's system and audio.

Baker also wanted to give patients an amazing experience by communicating with them in the ways they prefer, including secure text messaging, and any new functionality had to meet the company's HIPAA requirements. PDS enlisted Sidepath, a telecommunications and technology integrator, whose consultant Mike Miller was tasked with identifying a holistic, scalable platform that would replace the legacy system and raise the experience across every office.

Sidepath pointed PDS to RingCentral as the recognized leader in cloud communications and the only provider offering a unified solution across every mode of communication. RingCentral met all of Baker's functional requirements, starting with reliable phone service through RingCentral Office and extending to video conferencing with RingCentral Meetings and RingCentral Rooms, faxing with RingCentral Fax, and instant messaging with RingCentral Glip.

Security was decisive. RingCentral's HITRUST Common Security Framework certification meant the whole suite complied with the HIPAA Security Rule. As a cloud UCaaS solution it also supported the transition of PDS's IT infrastructure to the cloud, and it integrated with the other cloud tools PDS already used, including Salesforce, Box, Office 365 and Okta.

PDS runs the deployment with two teams: one equips new offices as they join the company, and the other upgrades existing offices. In both cases the process is simple. An office needs only an Ethernet port; everything else is configured remotely, and staff receive a remote training session on the tools. The leadership team also adopted RingCentral Meetings and Rooms for video, gaining an instant-on experience from a conference room or a mobile phone. Early tests of Glip for patient appointment reminders showed strong results with secure texting, which Baker identified as one of the most important deliverables of the new solution.

• One unified cloud platform for phone, video, fax and messaging across more than 625 supported offices
• HITRUST Common Security Framework certification satisfies PDS's HIPAA Security Rule requirements
• New offices go live with just an Ethernet port, remote configuration and remote training
• Instant-on video via RingCentral Meetings and Rooms replaces VPN-dependent calls that took 10 minutes to connect
• Secure texting with RingCentral Glip showed strong early results for patient appointment reminders
• Greater use of video conferencing is expected to push travel costs down