CareStack redefines business outcomes for dentistry leveraging Microsoft Azure

Barriers to delivering clinical excellence

While solutions that provide specific functionality, such as patient management, treatment management, etc., have been available for a while, the dentistry market needed a unified application to fulfill all practice-management needs. The absence of such a platform meant that dental practices and other organizations could not offer their customers clinical excellence.

Dental clinics faced operational efficiency, patient satisfaction, and business growth challenges without an integrated cloud solution. They had to manage multiple legacy software subscriptions. They wrestled with problems such as data redundancy, lack of business insights, and workflows with too many manual interventions, leading to errors and mismanagement.

Additionally, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the challenges faced by the oral healthcare industry were even greater, as mandatory social distancing significantly restricted patient inflows. Without online services to turn to, customers could not avail of dental services, which made business continuity a critical issue for many practices.

Exceeding customer expectations with Microsoft Azure

CareStack saw the need to develop a cloud-based practice-management platform to overcome these challenges in the dental practice industry. With the general affinity of the healthcare industry towards Microsoft technology stack and healthcare being seen as an important vertical by Microsoft while offering cloud services, CareStack's choice of a cloud partner was rather easy. Furthermore, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has set security, privacy, and compliance standards to host sensitive Protected Health Information (PHI) data. Microsoft Azure provides operational and implementation guidelines that help its customers comply with HIPAA standards. 

The first version of CareStack®, a cloud-born and Azure-native solution, was developed in just 12 months. Tamojit Sengupta, Head of Product, CareStack, says, "Microsoft Azure played a critical role in helping us deliver our brand promise – 'Do more than what we get paid for.' The solution is scalable, secure, and highly available. It also helps us comply with HIPAA regulations. We can satisfy our customer's requirements of optimized practice operations and increased focus on quality patient care."

The solution offered several advantages from various perspectives:

• Improved scalability at lower costs:

  CareStack® is an auto-scalable solution using the deployment stamp-based architecture, which makes multi-tenancy possible. The architecture allows the company to handle large, mid-size, and small customers. Each stamp can scale horizontally and vertically to serve the sizing needs of individual customers or multiple tenants. At the same time, smaller customers can share a multi-tenant deployment. The company can deliver better scalability at lower costs by rightsizing underutilized or shutting down unused resources and using the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
  
  

• HIPAA-compliant and highly secure health data and medical records:

  Using Microsoft Azure, CareStack ensures that health data is secure while enabling data interoperability between different services. Azure also incorporates the physical, technical, and administrative safeguards HIPAA requires. Additionally, the company regularly uses Microsoft’s literature on HIPAA considerations, ensuring that CareStack® always complies with HIPAA standards.
  
  

• Business continuity during the pandemic:

  Like many other businesses, dental practices were also impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Initially, a large number of dental practices had to be shut down. Then they were compelled to reimagine their systems and procedures to comply with stringent safety requirements. The pandemic made customers reluctant to undergo dental treatments due to the fear of infection, and teledentistry was not widely available. CareStack® provides technology for virtual care services, curb-side check-ins, online therapies, contactless payments, and more. These solutions ensured business continuity which led to enhanced customer satisfaction.
  
  

• Delivery of more value to customers:

  With CareStack®, dental practices get an all-encompassing, cloud-based platform that reduces the cost and effort of managing multiple software subscriptions and other administrative tasks. With its expertise and experience, CareStack delivers innovative services and adjacent products to improve operational efficiency, generate actionable insights, and uncover opportunities for business growth.

Karthik Raveendran, Vice-President, Engineering, CareStack, says, “We aspire to be a disruptive force in the global dental landscape. Our ability to pivot and be nimble-footed on technology choices has defined our success so far. With its bleeding-edge cloud service, Azure has proven to be the right partner in our journey. In addition, their customer support network has been a guiding force and a strong collaborator in shaping our product.”

Nameel A.M, Vice President- Technology, CareStack believes, “Azure's cloud capabilities have proven instrumental in our ability to bring innovative solutions swiftly to the market. Scalability of Azure has allowed us to adapt to fluctuating demands seamlessly, optimizing resource allocation and avoiding unnecessary delays. This agility and responsiveness have not only reduced time-to-market but also positioned us to iterate and evolve our offerings rapidly in response to changing market dynamics.”

Adjacent product lines are built as microservices around the core CareStack platform. CareStack has embraced Azure Kubernetes Services and looks forward to exploring new ways to create additional value for customers by leveraging OpenAI, data engineering, and analytics services.