TORONTO – “What’s the phone company doing in healthcare?”
That’s a question that Paul Lepage (right), president of Telus Health, and Michael Guerriere (left), its chief medical officer, hear often.
The answer, in short, is that healthcare is Telus’ content play. While its competitors snap up content providers or add to their list of media assets, Telus has jumped headlong into the healthcare field, investing more than $1 billion in Canadian health IT over the last six years to capitalize on what it sees as that industry's enormous growth potential.
“The other telcos and cable companies are all making investments in broadcast assets and sports teams to be able to deliver content to people’s devices, smartphones, TVs, etcetera”, Guerriere told Cartt.ca. “So we decided to take a little bit of a different direction. We see a huge opportunity for bringing the consumer into the healthcare ecosystem and allowing them to interact with (it) in the way that we all do with the other service industries.”
At a recent presentation at Telus’ gleaming downtown Toronto office tower, Telus House Toronto, Lepage and Guerriere said healthcare is a big, growing business, noting spending in Canada in that sector in 2013 was estimated at $211 billion and is increasing at a rate of 2.6% per year. With the world’s aging population and rise in chronic diseases, Telus Health is focussing on developing and selling technologies that connect doctors and healthcare practitioners to one another and to their patients, across Telus’ national network.
To date, the company has zeroed in on five distinct but related initiatives: electronic medical records (EMR), where physicians forgo paper and digitize their clinics, allowing patient information to be easily and securely shared among all the professionals within a patient’s circle of care; home health monitoring (HHM), a form of telehealth that involves the real-time remote exchange of healthcare data between a home-based patient and health professionals; and personal health records (PHRs) whereby patients record, manage and share their own health information using customizable online tools. This technology is ideally suited to individuals managing chronic conditions, such as diabetes or asthma, and in mental health management.
"The market is shifting from people wanting to build everything themselves to people wanting to deliver solutions faster to their various customers." – Paul Lepage, Telus
Pharma Space is a web portal that doubles as a communication tool between a patient and pharmacist, and also permits collaboration between pharmacists and doctors. Pharmacy customers may view their drug profiles, request prescription refills, and receive medication alerts via their smartphone, as well as manage the health account of a loved one. In addition, the portal is integrated with Telus Health’s Pharmacy Practice Management software, allowing pharmacists to fulfil patient requests directly from the same system that they use to manage their pharmacy on a day-to-day basis.
Telus is also a reseller of wearable devices including the Fitbit Flex and Samsung Gear Fit, which allow users to track health and wellness metrics like weight, sleep, and calories burned. The company estimates that the Canadian consumer wearables market will explode by 62% over the next five years, in line with the U.S. where 100 million health-related devices are projected to be sold annually by 2016, generating some $6 billion in sales.
Telus Health’s investments are beginning to pay off, with some 13,000 physicians using its electronic health records, and almost 300,000 Canadians using the electronic prescription renewal service.
Guerriere says that Telus Health doesn’t assume that all of its clients are also Telus customers, noting the company is “more interested in being the connector of all of the parts of the healthcare system as opposed to having control of all of the devices or all the applications available in the doctor’s office or hospital.”
Lepage agreed, adding that the success of the solutions lies in them becoming “ubiquitous which means that you have to have several people participating in that solution to give it the traction that it needs”.
“Because of our carrier and wireless background, we’re very focused on building the solutions and having people access them on a ‘pay as you play’ basis”, Lepage continued, noting that this approach cuts both the expense and risk for clients. “That’s a model that is part of the Telus DNA. We’ll spend millions of dollars setting up a wireless network, negotiating spectrum, and all of those things, and then we’ll set it up and sell it on a per usage basis. The market is shifting from people wanting to build everything themselves to people wanting to deliver solutions faster to their various customers. We’re seeing that shift and seeing people wanting to do it that way.”
