Canada Life and Dialogue Partner for Virtual Telehealth

Need to Know

• Canada Life, Canada’s second-largest insurance company, announced that it is onboarding the telehealth services of Montreal-based Dialogue Technologies.
• Dialogue specializes in telehealth, covering both the physical and mental spectrums of healthcare.
• Canada Life recently joined forces with benefits provider League to provide more flexible packages to clients in an attempt to adapt to the expectations of the modern workforce.
• Sun Life, a direct competitor of Canada Life, partnered with virtual healthcare company EQ Care in fall 2019, but has not made the service standard to all plans.

Analysis

Canada Life, the newly formed conglomerate of Great-West Life, London Life, and Canada Life, has announced it is partnering with Dialogue to offer its clients (with up to 400 employees) telehealth services.

“We are always open to smart collaborations that help support the financial, physical and mental well-being of Canadians, and our relationship with Dialogue is a great example of this,” says Ryan Weiss, VP of product and experience with Group Customer at Canada Life. “Together we’ve developed a streamlined, proprietary virtual health care solution that will give more than one million Canadians easier access to high-quality health care.”

Dialogue is “a fully-staffed, virtual clinic that fits into your employees’ pockets” and allows employers to reduce absenteeism, attract and retain talent, and save on other health-related costs (like travel and wait times at the doctor’s office). By providing mobile and online consultations, video appointments, and virtual follow ups, Dialogue removes the friction between employees and their sick days, and allows them the room to be their best selves at work.

“As demand for virtual health care continues to grow, working with Canada Life to integrate Dialogue as a standard benefit is an important step towards improving access to quality care for all Canadians,” says Cherif Habib, CEO of Dialogue. “Since its foundation, Dialogue has set the bar around safety and security standards, an outstanding user experience and high member utilization. Soon, more than one million people will have access to our platform, and we feel honoured to serve even more Canadians every day.”

Not only does Dialogue provide video consultations or live chats with nurses, doctors, and mental health professionals, but they help employees navigate specialist referrals, provide prescription refills and free medication delivery, and overall help Canadians navigate the health care system.

Canada Life recently partnered with League to provide its clients with more flexibility with choosing benefits plans (and allow more independence in administering them.) This is a further expansion of their digital offerings and virtual services, which are the sort of time and cost savings that employers are eager to promote. 

The virtual services will become standard to all Canada Life plans in summer 2020 and will help over one million Canadians access health services more flexibly and on their terms.