Telus Health ‘scaling up’ as COVID-19 spreads

Telus Corp.’s years-long investment in e-health and telemedicine has found itself rapidly expanding as the COVID-19 pandemic forces Canadians to seek medical help without physically visiting doctor’s offices, with downloads of its Babylon Telehealth app increasing six to ten times since the pandemic began, and the company bringing on "hundreds" of new hires. Telus expanded Babylon’s reach to Ontario when the pandemic started, playing a role in the app being downloaded about 3,000 times each day since. The remote healthcare app now has a total of about 220,000 users in the three provinces it's available in, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. It was first launched in British Columbia just over a year ago. The company, according to analysts, could use the crisis to focus more on the developing sector and continue to expand its presence in healthcare. Unlike its competitors, who chose to invest in media and sports properties, Telus turned to e-health nearly two decades ago, a focus it ramped up with the purchase of electronic health care and medical records company Emergis in 2008. Telus's "experience here could raise awareness of these digital services and help expand its future role in the Canadian healthcare system," wrote Scotiabank analyst Jeff Fan in a research note on March 17 note on how the sector was responding to the crisis. The growth of "e-health, telehealth, telemedicine will be a more or less permanent change because of the pandemic," director of Technology, Media & Telecommunications research for Deloitte Canada Duncan Stewart said in a phone interview, while declining to comment on Telus specifically. "Going forward, this may be a more reasonable modality for medical care." Stewart said he will soon be publishing research looking into the adoption of new technologies during the last global pandemic of 1918-20, when what was called the Spanish flu swept the globe. He said that if the experience of the Spanish flu epidemic is any indicator, there may be an uptick in the adoption of certain technologies, but that will likely return to normal after the pandemic has subsided. He said that e-health, however, is here to stay. "The use of telemedicine will be higher in the post pandemic than the pre-pandemic years by a material amount," he said. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Canada and around the world, Telus has also introduced a COVID-19 self assessment tool, with which users answer questions about symptoms. Artificial intelligence (AI) then assesses whether or not they can book an appointment with a medical professional. After first launching in B.C., Babylon has since expanded to Alberta in February, and Ontario since the COVID-19 crisis came to Canada, according to a phone interview with Juggy Sihota, vice-president of Telus' consumer health division. Since the crisis, the company is "scaling up our services, scaling up our people" to the tune of "hundreds" of new hires, including medical professionals, Sihota said. Sihota said that the company is working on launching the app in other provinces, but declined to offer a timeline. Provincial governments, Sihota said, are working to "mobilize to make it easier for telehealth" providers to come into the market in the wake of the crisis, saying there are regulatory approvals to be granted in terms of physician quality and privacy. On Mar. 23, the government of Alberta added new billing codes to its medical benefits schedule, allowing physicians to bill for care provided through remote apps like the Babylon app. "Virtual care codes will facilitate patient care while making it possible to follow public health guidelines of maintaining social distance and self-isolation," Alberta Minister of Health Tyler Shandro said in a statement Monday. "Physicians should choose the best way to provide the care Albertans deserve without having to worry about fair compensation for their services.” According to the new billing schedule, a family physician can now bill $124.50 for a "comprehensive consultation via video conference for a referred patient." While Sihota says Telus has invested almost $3 billion and hired "a few thousand" employees over the last ten years, an analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity said its health division of the business still represents a relatively small part of Telus's overall business. When asked about whether the COVID-19 crisis would have any positive impact on the company owing to its health division, the analyst wrote in an email "keep in mind that Healthcare software and IT services accounts for only about $650 million in revenue for (on a base of about $15 billion). The remote diagnosis business (Babylon) would be just a small subset of that." "Healthcare is a great business for them with attractive long-term growth prospects (and it can help save both lives and government healthcare costs), but it can't save them from any erosion that might be felt in wireless/wireline telecom businesses," the analyst wrote, while stressing that all telecom businesses will be "extremely stable and resilient compared to most sectors of the economy." Deloitte's Stewart also cautioned that increased usage does not necessarily amount to increased revenue, citing the example of increased social media usage, but relatively flat advertising numbers. Asked if e-health divisions would become a feature of telecommunications companies more broadly after the COVID-19 crisis, Stewart said it was still too early to tell, and that the example varied from country to country. In Ontario, where the app has launched since the COVID-19 crisis, the province's information and privacy commissioner said his office is in contact with the ministry of health about the app. "We are reaching out to the ministry to determine whether the app is being used to provide health care in Ontario and what privacy implications might exist for Ontarians who might use it," commissioner Brian Beamish said in an email to the Wire Report. While Ontario's IPC is not required to approve the use of apps like Telus' Babylon, Beamish said the data collected by medical professionals through the app is protected by Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA). "A physician using this app to provide healthcare would be responsible for ensuring that the app complies with the rules for the collection, use and disclosure of personal health information under the law," Beamish wrote. "If Telus was acting as an electronic service provider under an agreement with a health information custodian, it would also be subject to PHIPA." Beamish also stressed that the onus is on users to consider the privacy implications before using the app. "We consistently caution health information custodians and members of the public, who might use these apps, to carefully consider the privacy policies, before providing consent, to determine how personal health information might be protected, used, and whether it could be sold," he wrote. "This kind of personal health data is highly valuable to marketers, retailers, and data brokers. It is also an attractive data type for hackers." In a statement, a Telus spokesperson said that while there isn't a mandatory requirement to submit a privacy impact assessment to the privacy commissioner in Ontario, "we have proactively reached out to the office and will be connecting with them in the next few weeks." — With reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Adam Langenberg at alangenberg@thewirereport.ca

Telus Health ‘scaling up’ as COVID-19 spreads

News | March 30, 2020

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Telus Health ‘scaling up’ as COVID-19 spreads

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