Health Catalyst Reviews

Thank you for this feedback, and I'm really energized to hear of your spouse's perspective about you working at Health Catalyst. That's how we want the loved ones of every team member to feel. I sincerely hope that each team member, each day, can feel appreciated at work, can be in a position to do their career's best work, can sense the importance of that work in contributing to the company's mission and success, and will go home and their satisfaction and engagement will spill over at home, and enable them to make a positive difference in the lives of their loved ones, friends and the community.

Thanks also for your feedback regarding healthcare training. We have provided some on-demand healthcare training through Health Catalyst University, but that's likely an area we could deepen, and there may be some other ways to provide more of this training. I'll pass this feedback along to our Health Catalyst University colleagues.

Finally, you have my commitment to continue to emphasize our operating principles, our mission and our cultural attributes. Thank you for your software engineering work these past 3+ years. The quality of our software directly contributes to the accomplishment of our mission as a company. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed feedback. And thank you for your kind words. They mean a great deal, particularly coming from a teammate who has been with our company for over five years. I sincerely appreciate the hundreds, if not thousands, of ways you have doubtless directly contributed to our company's success during your tenure at Health Catalyst.

I also appreciate your feedback regarding some of the downside of the Radford leveling process we rolled out almost a year ago. We've received similar feedback to your feedback from a few different sources, and I'm still trying to carefully consider this feedback as we think about 2019 and beyond. What you describe was certainly not the intent behind the rollout of the Radford levels, and yet I do feel that there is real merit to the consistency that a common approach, supported by external data, enables. We have a couple ideas that might serve as a "bridge" which might enable us to still benefit from the consistency of the Radford approach, while mitigating some of the challenges related to what you described. One example we're considering is a "cost of living" adjustment that we still apply to team members who fall at or above the 75th percentile, each year, rather than no increase. This has budget implications and is challenging also within the context of our focus on getting to profitability. So I don't yet have a definitive answer, but I did want you to know that we're mindful of your feedback, and others' feedback, and we're desirous to be as positive towards team members as we can, within the constraints of financial sustainability as well. We'll discuss this in today's All Team Member meeting, and keep sharing updates as we refine the 2019 operating plan.

Thank you again for your many years of contributions to the company's mission and success. I sincerely appreciate you! Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for your comments and for your confidence and support. I appreciate it. And thank you for choosing to join us, and bring your wealth of experience with you. We will remain focused on the mission and on the values and culture, and strive to live up to the Health Catalyst Way. We'll also try to acknowledge when we fall short, and then work hard to improve. Best, Dan... MoreLess

I really appreciate your feedback, and am happy to hear of the positives your are experiencing as a senior software engineer. Your role is so critical to the company's future success, so it is heartening to hear your experience has been positive.

Thanks for the feedback on the healthcare plan. I'm hoping that I can share some good news in that regard, which is related to the company's contributions to your HSA. The company contributes $1,000 into your HSA plan at the beginning of each year (for team member + family member plans), without you needing to match, and then will match your contributions per pay period up to a company contribution total of $3,400 per year to your HSA. And that HSA money is yours to utilize for co-pays and other healthcare-related expenses. So if you were to have taken advantage of the company matches, you would have contributed $2,400, and the company contributed $3,400 for a total of $5,800 in your HSA. You could use that $5,800 to cover the co-pay of $3,600 in the scenario you highlighted, when your baby arrived, and you'd still have $2,200 in your HSA account, which rolls over and stays with you permanently. So in a sense, you would have expended $200 of the $2,400 you contributed to your HSA, and the company's contributions would have covered the rest of the co-pay.

I hope this is the case, and that is certainly our intent in providing that combined health insurance + HSA contribution benefit. I would encourage you to check in with Linda Llewelyn, our Chief People Officer, to confirm you're receiving all the positives of our health plan benefits package. And, if I'm missing something, I'd like to better understand it, and wonder if you might feel comfortable setting up some time 1:1 with me to help me better understand. We absolutely want our benefits to be a positive differentiator for our team members, so if we've missed something and need to improve, we'll take action.

Finally, regarding the limited career path outside of management, this is an area of focus for us, and I believe we will be making progress in this regard, to stretch the positive career path for individual contributors to longer than a five year time horizon -- perhaps more like a 10-year horizon. I would also invite you to think about management as a potential career option -- management has its downsides, and isn't for everyone, but it does afford the opportunity to leverage your skills to the benefit of a larger team, which can mean there is greater impact and contribution, through the effectiveness of the team. Thank you for choosing to join us, and for contributing to our success as a company. I'm grateful for your contributions to our mission. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for sharing these detailed and well-organized and reasoned thoughts. They are resonant with me, and consistent with feedback we receive elsewhere. Let me address a couple of the themes you highlight. First, the need for work-life balance. This is something that requires constant focus, and there absolutely are times where we need team members, as fellow-owners who are committed to the mission, to spike their efforts. But this needs to be followed by compensatory time to recharge. And the overall pace needs to be long-term sustainable, as we are engaged in a mission that will take decades to fully realize. As part of the 2019 planning process we are trying to build in some slack in the form of a bench in professional services.

Second, related to your comments about the need for better integration between technology and services, I believe we will take some important steps towards integration in 2019, and we are preparing and iterating on the "how" as part of the 2019 planning process. We will become more focused on "solution bundles" of both technology and services, or tech-enabled services, all aimed at a particular customer problem or pain point. This should help us make progress in integration in 2019. But no matter how we organize, there will always be "seams" that we have to manage, and that's also why we try to keep our objectives largely focused on company-wide goals, to encourage integration and an overall "ownership" mindset. We will keep working on this.

Thank you for your contributions to the company for over three years. I deeply appreciate the contributions of team members such as yourself, who have chosen to stay with the company for many years. I strongly desire to enable you to want to stay at Health Catalyst for many years to come, and feel as you do when we lose a long-tenured teammate. We will keep working hard, every day, to strive towards the goal of Health Catalyst as a best place to work for every team member. Thank you again for your feedback. Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for sharing this feedback. One of the positives of responding directly to each Glassdoor review, for me as the CEO, is that it is one way to stay connected to "unfiltered" feedback, which can be very helpful. We have a few other mechanisms to try to help us receive "unfiltered" feedback, including our semi-annual Gallup surveys of every team member, and then many skip-level 1:1s and small-group discussions that I and other members of our leadership team participate in throughout each year. I try to hold approximately 100 skip-level 1:1s each year, and mostly just listen to what's going well and then proactively ask about what my colleague feels we should consider changing about any aspect of the company.

There will always be opportunity for improvement. We will never be at a point as a company where there isn't a list of items we need to address in order to become better. What is critical, from my perspective, is encouraging, systematically, the unfiltered feedback to be shared, so that we can understand and then address those items that need to be addressed. This, to me, is a correct application of the attribute of humility -- most critically to be modeled by leaders who encourage feedback on what we need to improve, rather than shutting that feedback down.

Related to this, I want to validate the feedback you shared about the incorrect application of the attribute of humility. I have heard this feedback from multiple sources, and it has reinforced the importance of us clarifying and reinforcing our message and training. This includes a reinforcement that humility is most important in our leaders -- particularly in their openness to new, even opposing ideas, and their encouragement of receiving feedback from their teams on areas of needed improvement. It is absolutely critical that these leaders foster, and do not discourage, openness to multiple diverse points of view, and to the concept that they can learn from each of their colleagues and teammates, which requires that they not shut down contrary ideas.

It's also critical for every team member to live the operating principle of courageous transparency -- when they believe an alternate voice needs to be heard, it is crucial that they share that perspective, courageously! We will work to reinforce this, including during today's All Team Member meeting, where we'll specifically review, as a company, your feedback, and talk about it together.

Next, relative to our buildout of web apps, this is a relatively new area for the company, so I agree that we need to carefully monitor our performance here. I have been pleased to see the number of installations of some of our most popular web applications, now at dozens of our existing clients. We will make utilization of these applications a major focus for 2019.

Finally, regarding turnover, I also pay close attention to this metric, and we'll share the data today in our All Team Member meeting, as we always do, from our most recent board meeting two weeks ago, which includes our "people" slide, with data on our trailing-twelve-month turnover rate for everyone to see. It is a critical part of our mission to attract and then retain talented team members, and we will always have room for improvement here. The data that we'll review together today shows that the company has maintained a voluntary turnover rate between 6.7% and 8.4% during the past twelve months, with October coming in at 6.9%. This voluntary turnover rate compares quite favorably (less than half) vs. industry averages, but still highlights opportunity for us to improve.

I am sorry that it didn't work out for you to stay at Health Catalyst and continue to contribute to the company's mission and success. We will work hard to address the issues of openness to different points of view, of strengthening our web apps and retaining our team members. And I wish you success in your future endeavors! Best, Dan... MoreLess

Thank you for your feedback, and I agree with your enthusiasm for the innovation at Health Catalyst, and for the qualification of the team members who have chosen to join and stay at Health Catalyst . I also agree that travel is heavy and due to our distributed workforce, as well as our flexible model regarding remote work, we have fewer interactions than perhaps might be ideal. We have some initiatives underway that I believe will help in these areas, including increased use of video conferencing, as well as a reconfiguration of the SLC office to encourage more interaction when team members are in the office. We'll keep working on it! Thanks for choosing to join Health Catalyst and contributing to the mission! Best, Dan... MoreLess

I appreciate you taking the time to share this feedback. I've read it a few times, and we will discuss this feedback together with our colleagues in technology leadership. As we do so, we'll have the opportunity to resist the temptation to be defensive, and replace defensiveness with humility and an openness to receiving challenging feedback. This is one of the reasons why it is incredibly important, particularly for those in leadership at Health Catalyst, to cultivate and exercise the attribute of humility. It doesn't mean that after carefully considering this type of feedback that we will always agree with all the feedback, but it does enable us to be open to the "nuggets" of feedback that are confirmed by other data and feedback sources, and should be paid attention to and acted upon. We also will try to follow the balanced practice of not over- or under-reacting to challenging feedback as we receive it.

With these principles in mind, let me offer a few initial thoughts. First, it is clear to me and to us as a leadership team that one of the most critical areas of focus for the company in 2019 must be to strengthen the performance, reliability and scalability of the Data Platform. As you correctly highlight, every other solution that Health Catalyst offers to clients relies on the data platform, and we have had some performance issues at a few clients in 2018 where the performance and reliability of the platform has affected our ability to help these clients achieve their objectives.

We also need to become more directly tied to our customers' needs as we further build out our technology solutions. We as a leadership team are pondering a few different ways in which we can strengthen this connection in 2019, and are including this objective as part of our planning process. This is another element of your feedback that resonates with me.

And finally, we need to provide managers at every level at the company a clear set of expectations of how to become an effective leader and manager of their teams, which fundamentally includes a level of humility and openness to opposing or different points of view, rather than shutting down those points of view. The 360-degree feedback surveys reinforce this, and we are committed to taking action where those surveys highlight a need for improvement.

I regret that it did not work out for you to stay at Health Catalyst longer-term. I also acknowledge that when a working relationship does not work out with a team member, there are always multiple contributing factors, including factors where we could have done better and been better. I wish you success in your future pursuits and thank you again for sharing this feedback. Best, Dan... MoreLess