TELUS International

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the manager of program effectiveness for the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) of Ontario. We handle workers' compensation claims for the providence of Ontario.

What challenge were you trying to address with TELUS International?

We hired TELUS International because we previously had an archaic healthcare billing system. Our objective was to modernize that billing system.

What was the scope of their involvement?

TELUS International built the end-to-end functionalities of our healthcare billing platform. It allows healthcare institutions to submit their bill to the WSIB. We’ve also had some B2B billing solutions where a hospital can submit a billing file securely and then we process that file.

Once they come to us, the majority of those bills don’t need to go to an adjuster. In fact, 85%–90% of those bills are automatically adjudicated by the system that was built by TELUS International, only resulting in about 10% that needs to go to a person for a decision. It automates the payments at the end.

It’s a robust solution; we had to pull together a few platforms to develop it including PowerTrap and SmartAdvisor. Apart from that, the system is home-grown by TELUS International.

The initial launch was in 2002 but since then we’ve built additional modules to keep it current with industry standards.

What is the team composition?

They’re a fairly large company. Our primary account team has about 5–6 individuals who are intimately involved with the solution and contract. They have project managers, and we have an account executive. There’s another individual who’s responsible for operational support. There are also business and system analysts working with us.

How did you come to work with TELUS International?      

We did an open RFP process in order to bring on a solution partner and TELUS International was the successful proponent.

How much have you invested with them?

The original solution was $30 million dollars in 2002 funds. We now spend $8 million–$10 million with them on an annual basis for ongoing maintenance and transaction components for the contracts.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing partnership started in 2002.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Ever since we’ve worked with TELUS International, we’ve greatly enhanced our turnaround time in payment processing because of the platform's automated solution capability. We cut down our payment timeframes from three months down to between two weeks and a month.

The solution services about 30,000 active healthcare institutions within the providence of Ontario. It’s a legacy-based system, rarely goes down, and is available 24/7. We’ve seen an uptick where most healthcare institutions have switched over to online billing — which is exactly what we wanted to happen. There’s a 70 to 30 split with a preference for the online submission option. We’ve tapped on additional tools and online services throughout the years.

How did TELUS International perform from a project management standpoint?

TELUS International is a traditional project management shop in terms of development and solution-delivery lifecycles. They’re a leading electronic medical record provider in Canada. Their approach is a traditional waterfall where we provide requirements, they’re sized-out, and then scheduled into releases throughout the year. They have a robust support structure to deal with end-users directly, which we leverage.

Having said that, it’s still very collaborative. We have ongoing formal meetings at the operational management level to continue our relationship and stay on top of any issues or development items we need to build onto the system.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What sets them apart is the balance of both value of the functionalities they’ve brought on board together with their ability to connect and build a platform that was scalable to adapt to the e-health landscape. The system adapts to new EMR standards because of the portability of the data that’s being produced. They’ve also maintained security protocols that have prevented successful penetration attacks or hacks of any personal health information.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’d be good for them to start thinking in the more agile way of solution development to be able to be nimbler and pivot on a dime when things occur in the industry. While they’re in tune with what’s going on in the industry, with a traditional approach, it’s not always feasible and it can be easier to fall behind. Having different approaches and project methodology in the iterative space would certainly help them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They give you stability, so I’d recommend potential customers to push them. Try to think outside of the box on behalf of TELUS International and pose analytic questions that’ll improve your solution. On top of that, have clear requirements going into that engagement to set the expectations on both sides.