GREEN SHIELD CANADA

ZAHID SALMAN PRESIDENT AND CEO virtually . " I look back at 2018 and 2019 when we were starting to strike our first investments in virtual care , and displaying these new capabilities to Canadian employers , and by extension , their plan members . There was interest , but I ' d say their thinking was that they didn ' t want to commit new or existing funding to it .

" That changed quickly in March last year ," he adds . " All of our data suggests that the attitude of plan sponsors and plan members has changed quickly . Namely , by living through a life of lockdown and not having access to traditional services , digital health services were more front of mind . The response has been universally positive , both with the customer experience and satisfaction with health outcomes . Now we have a landscape where we can expand these offerings ."

GSC ' s partnership with Accenture is enabling the company to add new capabilities it hasn ' t had before . " We just built the new GSC everywhere platform , and historically we had built and managed these platforms on our own . We were confident upgrading such offerings on our own ," Willows says . " But when we are talking about introducing vastly increased CRM capabilities , changing and adding data and analytics platforms , and increasing our cloud posture , a lot of this will be new to the organisation . We ' re able to say that for this next generation work we need to enhance our team with additional subject matter experts and certainly Accenture is a company that has done this with organisations small , medium , and large many times before ."

Having a strong partner ecosystem will be vital to this digital mission . " It was a really critical topic even before we contemplated some of the specific aspects of our digital

108 November 2021