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Letter from the Founder

How Does a Commercial Fisherman End Up Building Canada's Most Comprehensive Provider Claims Portal?

The honest answer: a herniated disc and a particularly stubborn refusal to accept that things have to be done the way they've always been done.

I spent eight years on commercial fishing boats off the British Columbia coast — hauling Dungeness crab traps near Tofino, mending gillnets on the Fraser River, and learning every single day that the ocean doesn't care about your schedule or your assumptions. The Pacific teaches you to respect systems you can't control and to adapt when conditions change without warning. Those turned out to be useful instincts for what came later.

In 2004, a back injury ended that career in the span of one bad lift. L4-L5 herniation, three months in a brace, and an abrupt reckoning with the fact that I needed a new plan at thirty-one years old.

During a long recovery in Victoria, I enrolled in a Health Informatics course mostly because the campus was walking distance from my physiotherapist's office. (Practicality has always been my primary motivator.)

What I discovered was that I had a peculiar aptitude for the space between healthcare and technology — and, more importantly, an outsider's compulsion to ask "why" instead of "how." I wasn't burdened by the assumption that healthcare billing had to be painful. I just couldn't understand why it was.

I earned my PhD at the University of Victoria, published 38 peer-reviewed papers on health data interoperability, and eventually landed an Associate Professor position at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. For six years, I taught graduate students about health systems integration, electronic data interchange standards, and the gap between what technology could do and what healthcare administration actually used it for.

But academia wasn't where the problem lived.

The problem lived in a physiotherapy clinic in Kensington where I watched a billing clerk named Diane log into seven different carrier portals every single morning, manually re-keying the same patient data into each one, making the same transcription errors, eating the same rejections — 18% of claims bouncing back, over $200,000 in revenue evaporating annually into the administrative void. Diane was meticulous, experienced, and working as hard as anyone could. The system was failing her, not the other way around.

That was 2013.

I took an unpaid leave from the university, assembled a small team of three, and incorporated Providerclaimconnect Inc. at 637 3 Avenue NW in Calgary. We rented 400 square feet above a pizza shop and started building.

The premise was deceptively simple: one portal, every carrier, every province.

The execution — mapping fee guides across 14 provincial and territorial health programs, integrating with 60+ insurance carriers, building real-time pre-submission validation, doing it all within PIPEDA and provincial privacy legislation — required the kind of meticulous, craft-level engineering that neither fishing boats nor lecture halls had fully prepared me for. We burned through our initial funding in seven months. We rebuilt the carrier integration layer twice. We nearly shut down in March 2014 when our primary EDI gateway vendor went bankrupt overnight.

But the outsider's perspective? That was the advantage.

I questioned every assumption.

Every "that's how carriers do it" got a "why?" in response. Every "providers are used to rejection rates" got a "but what if they didn't have to be?" And every "you can't integrate with that carrier — they don't have an API" got a "then let's build the bridge ourselves."

Priya Chandrasekaran joined me in 2014 as co-founder — bringing six years of EDI integration expertise from TELUS Health's eClaims division and the technical precision I lacked. Where I'd sketch an idea on a napkin, Priya would produce a spec document with version control. Where I asked "why," Priya asked "to what specification?" She saved the company — literally — by reverse-engineering carrier response formats that no one had documented publicly, building connectors that still run today with 99.97% uptime.

Together, we built something I'm proud of: a platform that now processes over 3.2 million claims annually with a 96.7% first-pass acceptance rate, serving 4,800+ provider locations from coast to coast. Our team has grown to six core leaders — each one an expert I'd trust with my own clinic's billing, if I had a clinic.

I never returned to full-time teaching — though I still guest-lecture once a semester at the Cumming School, telling students the same thing: if your theory can't survive a Monday morning at a physiotherapy front desk, go back to the whiteboard.

If you're curious about how our platform actually works, the services page walks through all ten stages. If you have questions first, our FAQ covers the most common ones. And if you're the type who just wants to talk to a person, that works too.

Our Approach

Stop Losing Revenue to Outdated Claims Workflows

Most healthcare providers lose between 8% and 18% of billable revenue to rejected claims, manual re-keying errors, and stale fee guide data. We built Providerclaimconnect to close that gap — not with vague promises, but with specific, measurable differences you'll see in your first month. Here's how our approach compares to the industry standard, point by point. For a deeper walkthrough, see our 10-stage claims lifecycle on the services page.

Have more questions about how we compare? Our FAQ page covers pricing, PMS integrations, WCB claims, and more — in plain language.