We all aware of how technology has profoundly affected our lives and changed the way we do business. In light of current technological developments, the insurance industry has transformed significantly. Today, insurance companies are continually investing additional resources to improve their customer experience, and to provide the most user-friendly claim systems available for all types of clients.

With the latest improvements for the Group Benefits online systems, plan members can:

• Submit claims in a secure and controlled way by avoiding filling out claim forms
• Save time with faster claims submission and get reimbursed within 24-48 hours
• Receive notifications via email/text once a claim has been processed
• Access information about benefit statements and coverage balances
• Check drug and travel assistance information
• View and print member ID, drug and global travel assistance cards
• Locate nearest provider who has direct billing access and many more…

If you are:

• a new employee joining to the team,
• an employee who didn’t have time to register to online services,
• or an employee who needs assistance with the registration please keep reading this issue to learn how to register and navigate through Sun Life Financial`s mysunlife.ca; and Great-West Life`s GroupNet.

***Depending on your insurance carrier and type of plan, please keep in mind the registration
process and menu options on your own page might be slightly different. However, registration and
navigation through the online services are very similar.

Go to mysunlife.ca and select Register.

After you submit your information, the system will search and locate your file. If you are provided a temporary registration code, please enter it now. If you don’t have one, you can email this information to your email address on file or you can receive the temporary code via mail. For postal mails please allow 7-10 business days to receive the code.

Once you have signed to the website, this is how your home page will look like (please check the next page).

The HOME page allows you to see your 5 most recent claims. Click All Claims to view your entire claims history.

Benefits Centre provides a quick view of your claims and coverage.

Under Benefits Centre, you can look up your drug information, get details of your medical and dental coverage, submit a drug and dental claims, and many more…

To learn more about what you can do in Benefits centre, please follow Step 2 on page 6.

Submitting a claim has never been easier. You can simply fill in the information online and receive your payment immediately. Once you submit your claim, you will receive an online notice telling you whether the expense is covered, the amount and details of your claim payment.

If this is your first time visiting www.mysunlife. ca, you need to register your direct deposit information to the system. In order to do that, please follow Step 2 – E on page 7. If you have already registered your banking information to the system, here is what you need to do submit your claims online:

This provides you with quick access to coverage available for you and your dependents under your medical and dental plans.

This provides you a Health Risk Assessment quiz to pinpoint what you are doing well and where you could use extra motivation to be healthy. If you are using pharmaceutical drugs, you can also find the alternative drug information, coverage, side effects, interactions and use guidelines in this section.

If you are looking for a local health service provider, in this section you can find the closest providers in your area and see how other members rate their experience with them.

Once you click “Benefits Centre”, the Quick View page will be displayed. You will immediately see list of most frequently requested information.

Claims menu allows you to submit your claims including drug, dental, paramedical, vision care, Health Spending Account (if you have one).

Here you can:

• Print personalized claim forms
• View a claim statement
• View most recent claims payments
• View claims history

You can search by health provider category for your area by entering your address, postal code or city. The results will also show you how other plan members rate their experience with the provider.

You are provided with a list of delisted health care service providers. Please make sure to check this list before you visit your service provider. You won’t be reimbursed for any claims or services from these providers.

Enter your banking information in the boxes provided, and then select the “submit” button. Once you submitted your information successfully, and then select the “close window” button.

After you add your banking information to the system, Sun Life will send you an email to confirm your email address. Validate your email address by responding to this automatic email.

Please make sure your email address is active and correct.

With GroupNet for Plan Members, connecting with Great-West Life is very easy. What`s your preferred way of getting in touch with your benefits provider?

Follow these steps to register and log in for the first time:

1. Go to groupnet.greatwestlife.com
2. Click GroupNet for Plan Members
3. Click Register (Have your plan number and member ID available, as you will be prompted to provide this information)
4. Follow the instructions to register and choose your own user name and password.

1. Sign in to GroupNet for Plan Members.
2. Sign up for Direct Deposit of your claim payments ( you will need your banking information)
3. Select edetails for email notification. You will be notified once your claims are paid, and will need these features to access Member eclaims.
4. On the GroupNet home page, click Claims – Online Claim and follow the steps to submit your claim.

If your service providers are using Provider eclaims, they can submit your claim for the service you received. As long as the provider is registered for Provider eClaims, you don’t need to submit your claim and you will be informed right away whether the claim is approved, declined or held for review.

If you don’t know if your provider is registered, you can check out the Provider eClaims listing under www.greatwestlife.com, ask your service provider or you can simply contact TELUS Health Solutions at 1-866-240-7492.

If both you and your spouse have coverage under your group insurance plans, you may be able to cover 100% of your expenses.

Do you, a friend, or family member struggle with diabetes?
Have you noticed that type 2 diabetes is becoming alarmingly common around us and worldwide? In 2017, The World Health Organization (WHO) classified type 2 diabetes as a global epidemic. The Canadian Diabetes Association estimates that over 1/3 of the population will have type 2 diabetes or be pre-diabetic by 2020. Why are these numbers are growing at an alarming rate? Could this be related to our sedentary lifestyle? In order to understand the problem, first we need to understand what happens to our body when we do something as simple as eating a meal.

After we eat, our body breaks down carbohydrates from foods into sugar molecules, especially glucose. However, glucose cannot enter our cells without the help of insulin, which the pancreas produces continuously in a healthy individual. As the blood sugar increases after a meal, insulin production also increases. The insulin unlocks cells so that glucose can enter them.

When a person has type 2 diabetes, either the pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin, or cells begin to resist the insulin. When that happens, sugar can build up in the blood and begin to cause the symptoms of type 2 diabetes.

According to the Canadian Diabetes Association, this alarming increase in diabetes is due to several factors, including rising obesity rates, sedentary lifestyles and an aging population. In addition, almost 80% of new Canadians are from populations at higher risk for diabetes (Indigenous, Hispanic, Asian, South Asian, African descent), and Indigenous peoples are three to five times more likely to develop the disease.

If you are not sure if you are at risk of type 2 diabetes, you can complete the online CANRISK questionnaire and get your risk assessment in under 2 minutes. 

Your chances of developing type 2 diabetes depend on a combination of risk factors such as genetics and lifestyle. Although you can’t change risk factors such as family history, age, or ethnicity, you can change lifestyle risk factors around eating, physical activity, and weight. These lifestyle changes can affect your chances of developing type 2 diabetes.

You are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes if you;

• are overweight or obese (approximately 60% of Canadians are overweight)
• are age 45 or older (risk increases for those over age 40)
• have inactive lifestyle (50% of Canadians over age 12 are inactive)
• have Indigenous, Hispanic, South Asian, Asian or African background
• have high blood pressure and/or elevated cholesterol
• have a family history of diabetes
• have depression (while the demands of managing diabetes may contribute to depression, it can work both ways. Depression can lead to poor lifestyle decisions, such as unhealthy eating, less exercise, smoking and weight gain — all of which are risk factors for diabetes.)

The Harvard School of Public Health states that about 9 in 10 cases of type 2 diabetes could be avoided by healthier living: keeping your weight under control, exercising, eating a healthy diet, and not smoking. As the old saying goes: “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

While lifestyle changes can have a significant impact on preventing or delaying the onset of diabetes, it is easier said than done. In fact, there are fun activities we can do to manage this condition.

Most of us ignore the possibility of a disaster striking because we think nothing will happen to us and the government will aid us when we need it. We should remember that emergency situations often occur suddenly and unexpectedly, and they don’t leave us with enough time to think rationally.

Recently, we all watched Hurricane Harvey and Irma cause destruction on the shores of the USA, witnessed our precious forests burning all summer long, and we are still wondering if the radioactive
contamination from the Fukushima earthquake (2011) has affected our fish and waters. These should be important reminders to us all.

Canadian writer and speaker Robin Sharma says, “Change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.” Changing our mindset around emergency situations is difficult, but should understand that we can learn to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

Let’s start with a therotical simple emergency scenario. Please answer these 5 questions to see how prepared you would be.

What if you knew from a 100% reliable source that in 7 days the power grid would fail for a full month?

• What would you do?
• Where would you go?
• Who would you contact?
• What purchases would you make, if any?
• If you or family members have medical needs, how will you replace it or survive without it?

After answering these questions, you may have realized that planning simple things sometimes takes a lot of time. When it comes to planning and preparing for future possible emergencies, preparedness can be invaluable. With preparation, our minds stop wandering with confusion and we increase our chances of survival.

Knowing the risks will help you when you make emergency plans, clarify your focus and set priorities.

Please visit GetPrepared.ca and learn more about the natural risks and other hazards monitored by your provincial government.

According to Government of BC the top 10 hazards and risks in our region are;

“Terrible tragedies

happen all the time

and it is time to be

responsible and

more prepared!”

Examining your financial situation and preparing your emergency plan around it should be your next step. Having an emergency plan will save time and make real situations less stressful. By taking 20 minutes of your time, you can make your emergency plan online.

With this plan, your family members will know important information such as: safe exits from home, meeting places to reunite, emergency contact persons and much more…

You can fill up this online survey and prepare your Emergency plan easily.

In an emergency, you will need basic supplies such as water, food, batteries, lights, cash money, medication, important documentation, contact information of friends and family. Be prepared to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours.

Please remember that some supplies can have expiration dates so make sure your kit is up to date and sits in easily accessible locations.

If you are wondering on what to have in the kit here is a great video explaining what to include on your emergency bag.

Alternatively, you can purchase your kit online or
from a retailer near you.

Fire prevention experts fear that outdated policies have, unwittingly created the conditions that we faced during the BC Wildfires. They are urging provinces to adopt more Indigenous burning practices. Traditional practices used by Firekeepers were banned, and as a result, dead trees were left behind, forests became prone to disease. Along with pine beetle infestations, this fostered the perfect ignition material for spot fires to spread and converge.

We need to remember that no one is immune from  disaster as they can strike any community with little to no warning. The investment in time is well worth the effort because it assures that you and your valuables can be safe from disasters. Let’s change our mindsets and start taking action in emergency preparedness because “Knowing Is Not Enough! You Must Take Action.”- Tony Robbins

Would you like to learn more about Wildfire readiness? Watch this video to learn more.

We all work hard to pay our bills, and have many weekly responsibilities for ourselves, our family, and our friends: house cleaning, grocery shopping, and taking our kids to school. However, many of
us can often feel these things are unrewarding and
even boring as part of our weekly routine.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your children told you that they would like to help you with household chores and then after dinner they would like to study math? How about turning weekly house cleaning to an enjoyable family activity? We can hear you saying ‘YES!’.

Now there is a fun, encouraging, and behaviour developing new approach that is changing our daily home and work lives. It is called ‘Gamification’. With gamification, you could transform long periods of hard, painful, and unrewarding work to something much more fun and enjoyable.

The term called ‘Gamification’ became popular in early 2010s, and since then it is shaping our work place, health, education and many other important aspects of our daily lives.

Changing habitual behaviours such as inactivity or commuting to school and work has proven difficult for traditional health initiatives. Gamification provides new opportunities to shift people towards a more active lifestyle by providing positive incentives and rewards players who get moving. In this sense, Gamification can be applied to almost any activity, and can help drive desired behaviors within the context of that activity. Today we know that with gamification, childhood obesity can be reduced and healthy family dynamics can be built. Children with special education show great improvements, overall student failure rate is lowered, and productivity at work is increased by making things simply ‘Fun’.

Gamification is a current method used to create a new pipeline of patient and clinical data, therefore realizing the importance of ‘fun’ tracking our progress and achieving better health outcomes by changing our behaviour is the goal.

Let’s have a look at couple of examples and see how Gamification improves the health of millions of adults and children`s lives:

mySugr is a friendly app for patients with diabetes to track their blood glucose throughout the day. The app does its best to make the task of diabetes logging less mundane and encourages patient engagement through the use of extensive gamification techniques, such as activities and rewards.

The app assigns points for everything patients do in the app. For example when users enter their blood sugar, they get couple of points; when they select what meal of the day it was, they get another point. With these fun elements patients manage their daily diabetes in more engaging ways to “score” as high as possible.

According to Ontario Canadian Diabetes Association, 30 per cent of children and youth in Ontario are overweight or obese. Numbers are not that much different in BC. First Nations and Métis children and youth have higher rates of type 2 diabetes compared to non-aboriginal children. In the quest to keep kids active, app called Zamzee is on a mission to help children and their families to make physical activity a fun part of daily life. Zamzee combines the fun of games and the science of motivation to boost kids’ physical activity levels.

In 2016 Pokemon Go took the world by storm. To date, it’s been downloaded more times than dating app Tinder, and has seen children and adults taking to the streets in droves to locate and catch virtual Pokémon. Gamers were willingly leaving their sofas to walk kilometres each day in search of their Pokémon prey. During this time, researchers and doctors acknowledged the physical and mental health benefits that the games was providing because participants were seeing exercise as more fun and less of a chore.

This app encourages smokers to quit smoking. The app uses medical elements such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to personalise the experience with challenges, messages and incentives. The creators say it changes the way quitters think about smoking and helps them to stay committed.

Super Better is a game to help with people with depression, weight loss, chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety, chronic pain and other challenging life events. So far it has helped nearly half a million people so far achieve personal growth and tackle real-life challenges. It is free so once you sign up, you can choose a goal you want to work towards, and add “quests” to your account that you can complete to work your way there. The player chooses the specific Power-Ups, Quests, Bad Guys and Allies suitable for the issue at hand. The game
functions as a creative and entertaining gamified, self-help approach, and a way to adopt a gameful mindset during times that don’t feel pleasurable in any way.

Workplace wellness has seen the rapid ascent of computing technology for healthy behavioural changes and well-being in the last two decades. This includes a broad range of consumer applications and badges, starting from monitoring and managing one’s own health and well-being, to serious organizational games for healthy employees and organizational success.

Gamification in corporate culture means motivating employees to use knowledge management systems, whether it’s a spread sheet, a CMS platform or a whiteboard– to inspire productivity, teamwork, innovation and wellness. Gamification, within the context of corporate wellness, is a tool to make behavioral changes and improve overall employee health. When employee is hungry and reaches for an apple instead of a candy, or exercising during lunch break instead of checking social profiles, this means mastery, autonomy, and control which are the same motivations for a gamer.

It’s a well-known fact that putting resources into employee wellbeing is beneficial over the long haul. Managers want to monitor, support and reward their employees with their fitness achievements while lowering healthcare costs and decrease absenteeism.However Ross Smith, Director of Test at Skype gamification and Director of Engineering at Microsoft has one caveat for managers.

According to his findings, if the attendance to the game is voluntary, then it becomes more fun for the employees. Being able to determine what makes things fun to the employees, increases participation rates and creates transparency and high trust within the organization.
Researches have confirmed that well-designed games are enjoyable and engaging because playing them provides basic needs of satisfaction to its users. For companies;

• It enhances the overall employee engagement and retention.
• It promotes good-natured competition for employees to achieve wellness goals.
• It makes employees and managers to understand each other’s values and collaborative skills and helps managers to create successful teams.

For example; Ochsner Health System, a large Louisiana-based healthcare company with more than 10,000 benefits eligible employees has applied Gamification. 50% of the employees who have participated earned enough points to achieve Level 3 in the game and received a substantial health insurance premium discounts for the next year. The company also saw actual cost savings from this approach.

Seeing the benefits of Gamification urges insurance companies to embrace games because they could promote better lifestyle habits. In light of this, one of Canada`s Employee Assistance providers Morneau Shepell released a program called ‘Getting to Your Gold’. The program is specifically designed to help motivate behavioural changes while connecting co-workers and Olympic athletes through an engagement program.

The primary objective of Getting to Your Gold program is to maximize employee engagement for employees own health outcomes. In order to make it accessible to users, the program is hosted on an online portal that houses different Olympic spirit- hemed challenges, athlete videos, heath & wellness polls and expert advice. With this program employee engagement and total wellbeing are optimized through fun and informative Olympic spirited challenges.

• Physical activity
• Nutrition
• Rest/sleep
• Mental wellness

As quoted in Corporate Wellness Magazine, ‘Getting to Your Gold’ offers a two-way support model: Employees will cheer on their Olympic athlete, while the athlete will provide encouragement and ‘coaching’ for employees to reach their wellness goals.

Increasingly, we are turning to technology to support our health, and this is not likely to change any time soon. Gamification could be quite the game-changer. Universities, hospitals and insurance carriers are incorporating this new approach to help their patients and clients. In the past ‘games’ were viewed as a frivolous waste of time, but health tech is taking us far away from that image.

Many examples show how fun games can influence and sustain changes for healthy behavior. Serious video and app games will continue to be “promising venues that seek to entertain while attempting to elicit behavioral change.” Gamification for wellness is here, and seems like the future is now. Look at the success with apps like Fitbit, Jawbone, and Misfit. These tools and games provide education, motivation, and big community.

Canada’s finance ministers finalized a historic agreement on June 20 2016, in Vancouver to expand the Canadian Pension Plan, which received healthy support from the public in order to relax concerns about the adequacy of retirement savings.

One of the concerns was that less than 50% of Canadian employees are participating in a registered company pension plan. The other concern was younger adults not being able to save enough for their retirement and falling in to low income range after they retire.

The CPP started in 1966 in order to fill the gaps in the existing Old Age Security. Old Age Security paid everyone the same amount per month, while CPP was structured based on your earnings. If you earn more, you pay more into the CPP and you get a bigger pension when you retire.

According to the federal government and the majority of provincial governments, unlike the1990s pension crisis, other challenges necessitated this new hike in premiums (from 9.9% to 11.9%). Things happened quickly because Liberals promised to enhance CPP as part of their election campaign. Also Ontario was determined to independently launch a supplementary pension plan in 2018. This placed an effective deadline for the Trudeau government to start the discussions.

For Federal and Ontario governments the main factor was the dire state of the traditional company pension. According to federal and provincial governments the main reasons for the change were:

Unfortunately governments have been slow to respond effectively to shrinking workplace pension coverage. RRSPs are supposed to fill part of the gap but every year the gap has been growing. According to Statistics Canada, the latest numbers say that 6.2 million people were pension plan members in 2013. That means an overall coverage rate of 37.9 %, down from 38.5 % in the previous year.

An expanded CPP is designed to address some of the shortfall in middle-income retirement plans as a result of diminishing corporate pensions.

The rise of the housing market in many cities is a big factor here. People are taking on huge mortgage payments to buy a house, and that means little or no money for retirement saving, especially for those working in the private sector. The private sector is a big issue because today barely one in five people are members of a plan. Also benefits have been eroded as companies move away from defined benefit plans with guaranteed payments, to RRSP-type defined contribution plans(DCPP)*.

As a result of these, workers under the age of 45 with middling incomes – say, families earning about $50,000 to $80,000 a year are at most risk. Without the defined-benefit pensions many people could hit retirement with little in personal savings and limited pension plan protection.

“ Low earners are
fairly well-covered
by other parts of the
pension system, but
too many current
middle-earners are
struggling“

Currently, the maximum monthly earning from CPP is at about $1,092 per month, or $13,100 per year but most people receive less, because earnings were lower than the maximum or they contributed for less than the 39 years required to receive full benefits. When we want to do the math and add the basic Old Age Security Pension of $546 a month, the result shows that these people are living on just under $20,000 a year from government sources.

• Some believe that it is not mandatory to contribute to premium increase but it is mandatory.
• Ipsos survey found that 75% of 2,003 respondents didn’t know it would take 40 years before the full increase in benefits is available. More than 25% of current retirees believed, wrongly, that they will see more on their CPP payments.
• Phase-in is going to take time and won’t even begin until 2019, with full implementation scheduled for 2025. This means that anyone retiring before 2019 won’t see any difference and those retiring shortly after that will see very little improvement.

Conservatives and small business owners are concerned about the CPP changes. For Dan Kelly, the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) and many small business owners, the CPP change seen as a “devastating move” [1]. CFIB is concerned that increasing CPP will make it even more difficult for SMEs to continue to grow Canada’s economy. According to the conservative Finance Critic Lisa Raitt SMEs might delay investments or freeze wages to pay for the bump in premiums. On top of the CPP hikes, a carbon tax will be introduced which may have negative effect on the government’s goal of creating jobs and economic growth.

Proponents of personal financial responsibility emphasize that the government is forcing its` own citizens to sacrifice a portion of their income now to save more for later.According to some, there are better alternatives to encourage Canadians to save on their own by saving vehicles such as Registered Savings Plan (RSP) and Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA). They state that the government should be focusing on educating workers about retirement planning by encouraging them to use private vehicles to save. These alternatives offer Canadians direct control over their savings, and can be passed on, directly, to heirs.

“ Younger generations
won`t be able to turn
home equity into a wellfunded
retirement because
house prices are expected to
go down “