40 Influential Leaders - Tom Raffio

Tom Raffio
President and CEO of Northeast Delta Dental

“The healthcare industry, both from the wellness perspective, but also from the insurance perspective, has always intrigued me,” says Tom Raffio, president and CEO of Northeast Delta Dental. “You can make a difference by providing quality service that make a real impact on population health.”

Since he took the helm in 1995, the company has grown from 50 to 200 employees, its network of dentists has doubled and revenue has grown almost tenfold to $483 million in 2023.

Raffio says that nonprofits can take the long view to target underserved populations without worrying about Wall Street, such as providing dental benefits to the state’s Medicaid recipients. In 2022 the state approved the measure, which advocates have been working toward for more than two decades.

“Oral health stakeholders, including Delta Dental, New Hampshire Health Coalition, New Hampshire Dental Society, myself and others, all worked to create the law. It was 26 years in the making. We were awarded the contract late in 2022 and had three months to get it up and running,” Raffio says.

Raffio has been focused on implementation and getting dentists to sign up. That is not an easy task given the low Medicaid reimbursement rates. “The government pays 50% of what a dentist would normally get,” says Raffio. “We work with the dentists to see the mission side of it. There are roughly 90,000 adults who now have access. It has been rewarding to see it happen, but it has been a lot of work.”

While continuing to build capacity, Northeast Delta Dental established mobile dental clinics, bringing dentistry directly to the patients until they get the number of dentists in the network to meet the need. “We are being really creative and it’s working,” he says. “We see about 2,000 to 3,000 patients per month.”

Raffio says to help tackle some of the major issues facing NH, Northeast Delta Dental made a “seven-figure investment” in the NH Community Loan Fund to support affordable housing efforts.

Raffio serves on the board of Early Learning NH and Northeast Delta Dental made significant investments to help tackle the childcare shortage, which intensifies the workforce shortage when affordable care is not an option.