Located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Tonume – pronounced ‘te-new-me’ – is an integrated health clinic offering a full suite of services designed to restore balance to the body, aid in the rehabilitation of physical injuries and help relieve the pain and stress from day-to-day living.
Since its opening 8 years ago, Tonume has grown from 5 healthcare professionals to a team of 36 specialists across 7 disciplines. Helen Tennant is the office manager and one of the founders of the clinic. “I was the only one working the front desk and managing all operational activities for many years,” Helen explains. “But as the clinic grew, so too did our administrative staff and we are now a team of 10.”
Growth has challenges
While the growth of the clinic was embraced, it didn’t come without its challenges. The clinic needed to continue to attract and retain patients and the operations team needed to find a way to standardize claim processing and complete an increasing number of claims efficiently.
“The first challenge was to increase repeat business,” explains Tennant. “While the clinic was experiencing great word-of-mouth referrals, patients were often hesitant to book recurring sessions as they had to pay all service costs and then submit insurance claims for reimbursement – a significant financial barrier.”
The Tonume team embraced best-in-class technology to address both challenges:
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Jane, a leading practice management software in Canada, made it easy for clients to book appointments online, while giving clinic staff a single tool for charting, scheduling, telehealth and invoicing.
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eClaims, a direct billing service, streamlines claim processes by giving clinic administrators the ability to submit insurance claims quickly and easily on behalf of their patients. This helps reduce the patient’s financial burden by allowing them to only pay for the portion of the service not covered by their insurance plan.
The next challenge was standardizing internal processes. While these applications individually resolved a challenge, they required duplicate effort due to lack of integration.
Two peas in a pod
While Jane and eClaims are great tools on their own, as an integrated solution they are a powerful resource to help clinics save time, streamline workflows and improve patient experiences.
“Having eClaims integrated in our Jane workflow just makes everything simpler for our entire team,” says Tennant. “The solution prompts each administrator through the same process, and ensures the proper information is entered at each step before continuing. It’s like having an audit happen in real-time as you go through the claim, ensuring the submission is completed properly the first time.”
By integrating eClaims within Jane, the process is refined ensuring that each part of the claim is completed accurately before continuing to the next step in the process.
"It’s like having an audit happen in real-time as you go through the claim, ensuring the submission is completed properly the first time."
- Helen Tennant, Office manager
eClaims in numbers:
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75% of Canadians with private health insurance agree that eClaims improves the overall experience when visiting an allied healthcare professional.
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+65K healthcare professionals are already using eClaims.
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60% of privately insured Canadians would consider changing healthcare professionals to benefit from eClaims.
eClaims and Jane:
Good for your clinic.
91% of eClaims-enabled healthcare professionals would recommend direct billing with eClaims.1
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Reduce double entry
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Submit claims faster
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Ease payment reconciliation
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Keep all patient data in one place
Good for your patients.
More than half (60%) of Canadians would consider changing healthcare professionals in order to be able to use eClaims.2
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Can reduce their out-of-pocket expenses by only paying for the portion not covered by their insurer3
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Cuts down on the hassle of insurance paperwork
Get started in 3 easy steps:
1 Survey results were obtained for TELUS Health through PMG Intelligence with 1,273 eClaims enabled healthcare professional respondents across Canada (September 2020).
2 Market research performed by Ad Hoc Recherche on behalf of TELUS Health (2021).
3 All features, functions, eligible professions and related benefits are inherent to the TELUS Health eClaims platform, but may not be supported by all participating insurers.