Health Catalyst Reviews

Pros

- Leadership: Transparent: Our leaders are transparent with their ideas and plans, and totally respectful. Everyone is welcome to ask questions, no matter how difficult they may be. We have All Team Member meetings every 2 weeks where our CEO and other leaders personally answer team member questions. Every All Team Meeting feels like a masterclass in leadership. Consensus-Driven: no ego-maniacs here. Our leadership team consists of an incredibly humble and hard working group of experts and leaders who are totally committed to the success of our mission. My managers have been kind and considerate while maintaining high expectations for my work and for me to improve. Competent: Even in the midst of a crisis, I feel positive about the company's outlook and future, mostly due to our excellent leaders. We talk frequently about "earning the right" to do certain things as a company that may cost more - and before we earn the right (i.e., grow as a company) we discipline ourselves with less. I think this discipline and focus will help protect the company for many years to come. - Employee-First is for real Incredible benefits. Leadership goes out of their way to help you develop and protect your job. YOU are the most important asset. Because we feel this way, we want the company to succeed. I feel totally supported to maintain a work-life balance and be the best parent and spouse I can be, while also developing myself professionally. There are tons of opportunities to excel and work hard. They provide a generous education benefit that helps me pay for courses to develop my technical skills. Even though this is my first job out of college, I feel respected and empowered to grow and learn and have an impact. - Purpose-Driven: This is the place if you're looking for mission-driven co-workers. If you want to have an impact on healthcare outcomes and helping hospitals and medical centers to meet their full technological potential, this is it. We're all driven towards that. Every company success feels like an exciting step towards making the world a better place.

Cons

Cons: - Not a "young & hip" technology company: ○ Which may not be a bad thing…but if you're looking for a lot of co-workers who are young people that play board games on breaks and go on company retreats to the woods, this may not be the environment for you. Many team members work remotely, or are only in the office occasionally, which can make developing close relationships more difficult. Client work is such that you may spend most of your work day alone working on projects or collaborating with people from across the country over Zoom or e-mail. This is especially the case these days since the office is closed, which has been totally the right thing to do. Most people have families, so this is a very family-oriented culture - though that doesn't mean we don't have fun! - Not exactly the "tip of the spear" in terms of technology: ○ This is a healthcare technology & services company - if you're looking for the most cutting-edge developments in machine learning or web technology, you're not likely to find it here. . .yet. It's not because we couldn't do that if we wanted to - it's more a feature of the industry we're in. We are razor-focused on meeting our clients where they are and helping them to develop the capabilities to use their data for machine learning and other advanced and efficient technologies to improve outcomes and help patients - but we get there with baby steps (for example, some clients don't have the data mastery to understand fundamental drivers of costs to their business, much less predict those costs). We don't glory in technology for technology's sake - we craft and use technology to help our clients be as successful as they possibly can be. - Client work can be frustrating: When working with clients, they can at times (though rarely in my experience) be stubborn or resistant to change or even downright hostile to it. It takes a lot of patience and people-skills to teach and persuade. At times your work experience will be dictated by whatever the client is working and focusing on, which can limit your ability to grow skills and stand out. It can be tough to make progress.This issue isn't unique to Health Catalyst since it's pretty common no matter where you work if doing client work.

Pros

Company leadership continues to impress and engender the greatest respect from me. The culture amongst the entire family of Health Catalyst is second to none and is the company's greatest asset I feel. I continue to have great faith in the leadership of Health Catalyst. at all levels, and have the strongest hope in the future of the company and my team members.

Cons

I continue to worry after Catalyst's ability to grow its own talent resources internally; to train and instill further education in its team members. The company does offer a generous education allowance for team members to utilize, however, the lack of formally directed, inservice-like training is creating silos of experience and knowledge that cannot be easily disseminated into the institutional memory of the company. It should be recognized efforts are being made in this area, but I feel much more is needed.

Pros

Management is incredibly transparent which is refreshing. They are very smart and seem genuinely open to new ideas and alternative views.

Cons

There is no 401k match. The earliest we can expect the company to match again is 2021.

Pros

Many truly good people at Health Catalyst. Leadership tries to take care of those who fit the Catalyst mold. True ability to act as a catalyst for improving healthcare.

Cons

Too many to list. Perhaps the most significant are the inconsistent application of company policies between the leadership and the employees (think of how the US Congress gives themselves special treatment) and the misguided interpretation of humility that encourages passive-aggression over open dialog. These, and the other cons, exist in an environment of much talk and little action -- unless the complaint is coming from leadership -- in which case there will be direct action and very little discussion -- at least very little discussion in the vein of permitting unbiased consideration of the opposing view. Overall "staying in your lane" is prioritized over performance -- and obesiance is a key part of staying in your lane. What gets "pushed to the margin" in this "don't make waves" culture, is hard work and competence. Getting results is not a priority. I guess leadership is okay as long as they can keep raising enough money to keep the water deep enough to cover the stumps.

Pros

I have been able to work on many applications and frameworks. Most of my managers have been great and understand if I’m not the most talkative. They have looked at what I have accomplished, and have taken positive feedback from team members who have spoken highly of me.

Cons

There isn’t enough time to become proficient at a programming framework or technology before moving to something else. I had some managers that thought I wasn’t paying attention if I didn’t say a lot. They would always call me out on it, and passed me up for any advancement. They seemed to judge me more on talking rather than the work I performed.

Pros

The leadership team is extremely engaged, and comes off as concerned, thoughtful, and approachable. They have built a company focused on the employees, and the company culture is very "familial". The benefits are quite good compared to other employers in the area, and the specific team I work on is fantastic, with no weak links and extremely good cooperation. This company is obsessed with how much their employees like working for the company.

Cons

The downside, however, is that in R&D, where I am, the work is not exciting at all. The technology platform is quite regressive, and while R&D middle-management talks up a storm about how we need to develop "for the cloud" and use "platform as a service", the reality on the ground is that it's impossible to do that, because some clients are self-hosted and that will continue to be true for the foreseeable future. The technology teams are tasked with maintaining several old versions, because clients are not required to update to newer software. This makes every change and bugfix extremely tedious, as the changes must be backported to multiple versions. Technology decisions are all made by R&D middle management, who suffers from an extreme case of "not invented here syndrome". Everything must utilize the flagship analytics platform, which means that everything must be built from scratch around that platform, even when well-established fully-capable tools already exist. This means time is spent reinventing wheels (poorly) instead of delivering real value for customers. While "dogfooding" is to be commended generally, in many cases, it's unhelpful to pretend that the flagship product is a master of every niche. Even if, on the off-chance that something interesting and forward-thinking does need to be done, it will be done by the "technology inner circle" and handed to the relevant team to maintain, who will never feel any pride in or ownership over it.

Pros

Health Catalyst functions at a high level of integrity and puts the best interest of employees at the center of every business decision. Companies like that are hard to find. In the wake of COVID-19, we've all been encouraged, clearly and repeatedly, to put ourselves and our families first. I can't speak for every team, but my manager for one has stood behind that policy 100%. And that's how HC has consistently operated during my term of employment: putting people first, doing the right thing, playing the long game, acting on trust. The benefits package is amazing; I took full advantage of the parental leave after my child was born and did so with the full support of my manager and team. Salary ranges are transparent and above average. And since the company was already built on a remote-first policy, COVID hasn't affected my day-to-day work at all. Not to skim over the best part - remote work is a big deal to me as an introvert. I work when I want and how I want, I'm never distracted by office noise, and I'm able to get things done in the way that's best for me. I truly enjoy working at Health Catalyst, and I feel very safe there.

Cons

I've groused about a number of things in my time here. Every complaint has been taken seriously, discussed by leadership, and responded to.

Pros

Great colleagues and culture (smart, collaborative, transparent, customer focused) Flexible work arrangements Generous benefits Truly cares about improving healthcare through analytics

Cons

Teams are spread out across locations and clients (collaboration greatly improving however)