Willamette Dental Group

Better patient care through better data integration

Willamette Dental Group company logoWillamette Dental Group company logo

Talend has made previously impossible tasks not only possible but simple. I’m not easily impressed but in this case I’m amazed.

Joe Russ

Two toothbrushes with wooden handles in a glass jar and a white tile wall in the backgroundTwo toothbrushes with wooden handles in a glass jar and a white tile wall in the background

Improve patient care — and operational efficiency — without adding complexity

Immediate savings

through lower on-premises infrastructure costs

Unburdening staff

by eliminating time-consuming maintenance

Better treatment options,

fewer visits, and lower premiums for patients


Willamette Dental Group may be 50 years old, but its practice remains visionary. “Our business is unusual in that we’re both a care provider and an insurance company,” says Joe Russ, Technical Architect with Willamette Dental Group. “Back in 2012, we had two separate home-grown systems managing enrollment and insurance. We needed to get patient data into the insurance system and insurance data into the patient system, and we needed a solution that could do that without adding more complexity.”

The IT team saw that moving to Talend in the cloud on AWS would provide the agility and cost efficiency needed to expand the benefits of Talend’s data integration capabilities. “The move to the cloud has a positive impact on every department and every function in our business,” says Russ. “Thanks to Talend, we can centralize all our data — not just patient data and insurance information, but also accounting systems, HR, and medical enrollment information. And when you can juxtapose data from multiple sources, you can provide better answers to big questions.”

For example: What kinds of treatments are most effective? What can be done to reduce the number of visits required and the total cost for patients? Where could providers benefit from additional training? Where else can the firm improve performance on behalf of patients?

At the same time, better information leads to better business results. “With access to payroll and HR information, we can see where we may need to hire more people, where our processes can become more efficient, where we could cut costs without impacting the quality of care,” says Russ. “Everyone wins — patients, practitioners, staff, and insurance providers.”

Talend in the cloud on AWS also had clear advantages over solutions from other vendors, according to Russ: “Talend makes us more nimble. With Talend, we can start moving to a hybrid model where some workloads can run in the cloud and others can run locally, and we can evolve our cloud model at our own pace.”