EVENT: HEALTHCARE BENEFIT TRUST EXPANDED PBC SERVICES CONFERENCE CALL REFERENCE: CNW GROUP LENGTH: APPROXIMATELY 18 MINUTES DATE: AUGUST 16, 2011

Transcription

1 1 EVENT: HEALTHCARE BENEFIT TRUST EXPANDED PBC SERVICES CONFERENCE CALL TIME: 16H30 E.T. REFERENCE: CNW GROUP LENGTH: APPROXIMATELY 18 MINUTES DATE: AUGUST 16, 2011

2 2 OPERATOR: Good Afternoon, my name is Alisha, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Healthcare Benefit Trust Expanded PBC Services Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Thank you, Sarah Hoffman, Chief Financial Officer of HBT, you may begin your conference. SARAH HOFFMAN (Chief Financial Officer, Healthcare Benefit Trust): Thanks, Alisha. Good afternoon, everyone. As Alisha just said, my name is Sarah Hoffman. I m the Chief Financial Officer at HBT. I have with me today Odette Lavoie, Vice President of Operations at HBT, and Anne Kinvig, the Chief Operating Officer at PBC. Thanks for joining us today to discuss our recent announcement that we are expanding our relationship with PBC. This expansion is going to include the management of our enrollment and billing processes for all health and welfare benefits provided by HBT. Today we d like to take approximately twenty minutes of your time to review the basis of this

3 3 decision, the financial benefits, the client services improvements, and our plans for ensuring a smooth transition. At the end of our discussion we do welcome your comments and your questions. For the past year or so, we have been consulting with you through conference calls, focus groups, and meetings on how we can improve our service to you. We appreciate all of your feedback and in particular the comments that your provided around our enrollment and billing processes. We heard you that there was a clear need for improvement in those areas. We ve explored various approaches to provide you with a more efficient and user friendly system. We have assessed each of these approaches for cost effectiveness, flexibility, alignment with your needs, and most importantly, how easy they will be for you to adopt and implement. We ve determined that the best approach would be to transition all of our administrative services for enrollment and billing and some plan support services to Pacific Blue Cross, who have a long history and commitment of serving you and your eligible employees in both an efficient and timely manner. Using PBC systems will be developing processes which should eliminate many of the steps and much of the paperwork required to complete our currently very cumbersome enrollment and invoicing

4 4 processes. Currently PBC manages billing and enrollment for your dental and your extended health benefits. The expansion of these services does directly reflect our 2011 prioritiy to insure that all of our services are delivered more efficiently and more cost effectively. This decision along with significant other improvements to HBT s business practices and rate setting processes as well as our recently announced selection of BC Investment Management Corporation as our investment management investment manager, sorry, are all in alignment with our three year service plan and our specific strategic goals of client focus, operational excellence and financial sustainability. Our agreement with PBC has a three year term with options for future renewal. Enrollment and billing for all products will be provided by PBC. Great West Life will continue to be responsible for LTD claims adjudication and claims payments. This change is intended to achieve a simplified enrollment and billing process and more accessible on-line information which Odette will speak to later in this call. We anticipate the new service delivery model will create reduced administration expenses at the Trust. Foremost, we are planning on eliminating 20 positions at HBT, in our finance, enrollment and IT department. We re very proud to say that our staff will be completing

5 5 extended working notice terms to insure business as usual throughout this transition, and once our project is completed, HBT will have a staff of approximately 81 full-time equivalents. We also anticipate system efficiencies through the use of the PBC systems, to reduce administrative resources both within HBT and for you. Additionally there is no requirement for any capital investment for systems or programs for you to implement these changes. The only change anticipated will be a standard on-line option that will be web accessible. Overall, we anticipate the future benefits financially of this change will be approximately $1 million per year. I ll now pass the call over to Odette and to Anne to address any PBC services and transition plans going forward. Odette Lavoie (Vice President of Operations, Healthcare Benefit Trust): Thank you, Sarah, and good afternoon, everyone. So as mentioned this transition involves a great deal of changes to be implemented over the course of 2011 through So in the coming months, we will work in collaboration with PBC and all of our clients to implement the new processes and provide training and support as required. I would like first to share with you our goals. The first one is that we wanted to address the system and processing efficiency in the most timely

6 6 manner possible. The second goal we have is that we want to avoid any future costs of upgrading the existing Genelco system, and third we want to have a smooth transition with minimal disruption for you, our clients. If we want to achieve these goals and maintain a very good service to all our clients during the transition, it s essential for us to shift some of our priorities. Therefore, we determined that it would not be possible to issue a Request for Proposal for LTD claims adjudication and payment services in 2011 as previously stated. The RFP has been delayed until mid to late As for the extended health and dental claims adjudication and payment services, it was decided that we would not issue an RFP at this time, though one could be pursued in the future in accordance with best practices. We are moving forward with PBC as quickly as possible. PBC has a longstanding relationship with HBT, and has an excellent reputation of client service. They have the technology and resources to support our clients through the transition and to deliver the most efficient and cost effective systems and processes for benefit administration. Now maybe let s talk a bit more about what processes will change and when this will impact you. The key changes we are proposing are as follows. Specifically for the non-ha employers, the enrollment in all

7 7 benefits will follow the same improved process and enrollment in all benefits will be done through the same service providers. They ll be PBC now. There will be no more conversion Excel spreadsheet required, so everybody, all the non-has have been very happy about this one, and the earning reporting would be simplified. We are looking at different scenarios right now, but this is really the objective. It is the kind of status quo for the EDI file that the HAs are using right now, but in the future we ll see if there s any improvement that can be done at that level. And for all the employers, HAs and non-has, invoices for all benefits will come from one source now, so it will be PBC, and the contributions for all benefits will be Phase II PBC instead of two service providers. Once these new procedures are in place, HBT s clients will liaise directly with PBC for enrollment in all benefits. PBC will also be responsible for billing and collecting employers contributions for all benefits and this will create basically a one stop shop consolidated single source for HBT related benefits. It s for sure that we are currently in the early stages of the transition, and right now we are working in close collaboration with PBC toward the development of these new processes. We are also exploring different scenarios to provide our clients with quick wins whenever possible, so we

8 8 are looking forward to your feedback and suggestions, and you know on our proposed changes, so please feel free to ask any questions at the end of this call or basically to contact me directly at any time. We plan to be very flexible in terms of transitioning clients to PBC, and over the next two months we will work out more specific timelines and options. A more detailed update on the transition plan will be provided, I would say, in October, late October. Until then, we encourage you to contact us should you have any concerns or questions. Very important for you to remember is that until that time, or further communication from us, all of our current processes remain unchanged. One last piece of information I would like to share with you is that our rates processes is not impacted by this change, and we plan to have your 2012 rates to you in the Fall, and there is also no impact on the plan rationalization initiative presented to you at the last conference call. So thanks, everyone, and we would now like to take any questions you may have. OPERATOR: At this time I would like to remind our participants, in order to ask a question, you may press star, then the number one on you telephone keypad. We ll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.

9 9 Again, in order to ask your question, you may press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We have a question from the line of Don Davis with Fraser Valley Child Development. Your line is open. DON DAVIS: Good afternoon. I m wondering what earnings reporting scenarios are you contemplating with respect to the LTD plan. Sarah Hoffman: Hi, Don. It s Sarah. Thanks for your question. We are looking at simplifying it as much as possible. We don t have details at the moment that we can share, but the best case scenario for us would probably be to moving away from monthly earnings, detailed earnings documentation strategy and moving towards something less frequent and less cumbersome. We had some feedback from people in the past that they d like to see us move towards a system that s closer to the MPP model or something that s closer to the Work safe model on providing reporting information. So we re looking at both of those options to see if we can somehow mirror our processes on that. DON DAVIS: Thank you, Sarah. I ve on other question and it you mentioned something right off the top about PBC taking over certain plan support services. Can you give us an idea what those might be?

10 10 Odette Lavoie: Yes, Odette here. What we re contemplating, it would be basically transparent for all the clients. It s more the administrative task related to maintaining the plan. So, as an example, documenting the plans in the IT systems and also documenting the booklets. So that s the kind of task that we are contemplating at transitioning to PBC, what we call the booklets, basically. DON DAVIS: Thank you very much. SARAH HOFFMAN: You re welcome. OPERATOR: Once again, if you d like to ask a question, you may press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We have a question from the line of Charlene Swanson (phon) with Interior Health. Your line is open. CHARLENE SWANSON: I just have a question about death claims. Are they still going to be through Great-West Life? ODETTE LAVOIE: Yes, that s the plan. CHARLENE SWANSON: Okay. Thank you. ODETTE LAVOIE: You re welcome. OPERATOR: Once again, that s star, one on your telephone keypad in order to ask your question.

11 11 We have a question from the line of Florizan Mesisco (phon) with Services Authority. Your line is open. FLORIZAN MESISCO: I was just wondering about the 50/50 reimbursement that we currently have with HBT, so we wanted to know how that will work now if it s transitioning over to PBC? SARAH HOFFMAN: There won t be any change to the 50/50 process at this point in time. You will still send through your request for the refund for the 50/50 through to HBT. Also we re not anticipating any changes to that or to any of the MSP reporting changes that we currently do. FLORIZAN MESISCO: Okay. Thanks. SARAH HOFFMAN: You re welcome. OPERATOR: Once again, ladies and gentlemen, that s star one on your telephone keypad in order to ask your question. We have no further questions at this time. I turn the call back over to the presenter. SARAH HOFFMAN: Thanks very much, Alisha. Thanks everybody for joining us today. It is our intention to continue providing information to you regarding our transition plans and any process changes as they come up. We ll be continuing our conference calls, webinars if appropriate, our

12 12 newsletter and our e-flashes. If you have any follow-up questions or comments, we would like to invite you to contact us directly, and we d be happy to provide any further details that we can. Thank you so much for your time today, and we look forward to providing more information to you in October. OPERATOR: This concludes today s conference call. You may now disconnect.. *****