Jul 9, 2021
Health Catalyst Response
4yThank you for your feedback and review. And I'm glad to hear that your experience thus far with your direct supervisor, with your compensation and benefits, and with your job flexibility have been positive. Thanks for sharing your perspective also regarding the time we spend on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion issues. While I agree that our primary work is absolutely focused on our mission of being a catalyst to enable massive, measureable data-informed healthcare improvement, I disagree that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion topics don't have an important place in accomplishing that mission. I want every team member at Health Catalyst to feel appreciated, respected, loved and supported in their important work, because when they do, their engagement increases and they are in a position to do the best work of their career. Any obstacles to that engagement are critical to understand and then remove, and some of the obstacles that some of our teammates face include challenges related to the color of their skin, or another dynamic like their sexual orientation or their gender. When negative experiences occur in the workplace based on these elements, these teammates are not in that ideal situation to feel energized to do the best work of their career. I have visited, 1:1, with hundreds of these teammates, over the past year, and heard firsthand examples of situations where these teammates have experienced these types of challenges in their lives, including some examples that have happened in the workplace. Through these hundreds of 1:1 interactions I have come to appreciate that I did not understand what it was like to be a teammate of color, a queer teammate, a female teammate, at Health Catalyst, and as such I also didn't understand or fully appreciate some of the unique challenges faced by these teammates. Now I better understand, after listening to teammates who have had these experiences. And that is why we are working to improve here, as part of an overarching desire to enable every team member to love working at Health Catalyst, and to do the best work of their career here.
Further, some of the important data-informed healthcare improvement that needs to occur is greater equity in the delivery of care. There should never be prejudice embedded in the delivery of care, of any kind, and when that exists, we are not yet optimized and there is important improvement work to do. Data can inform this improvement work, and I'm thrilled that we're working on these tough issues right now with multiple health system clients.
I hope that sharing the "why" behind our focus on Diversity topics was helpful and might persuade you to come to future topical discussions with an openness, particularly within the context of the "why we should be kind to one another" slide that we begin each all-team-member meeting with -- a reminder that what we know about another person's life and experience is so little.
Thank you again for your review and feedback. Best, Dan