Nearly every attribute of a company has both its positives and negatives. There are negatives associated with the three pros listed above.
1) Culture. The company is so thoughtful about its decisions that some decisions take longer than they should. A couple years ago there was way too much consensus building as opposed to decision-making delegation. This has improved as the company has grown but there is still a consensus-centric approach to solving certain problems, which limits decision making agility. The company needs to continue to promote transparency and healthy debates to drive to decisions quickly. Health Catalyst also values its team members and customers so highly that it has led to scalability issues. Health Catalyst needs to realize that saying no to customers / putting guard rails around customer engagements is a necessary tool to drive scalability.
2) Health experience. Health Catalyst’s value that it puts on having healthcare experience has limited the company’s talent pool as it relates to building a scalable sales, professional services, and product organization. The company needs to realize that it is a necessity have talent that has built national sales organizations, large professional services organizations, and large-scale software products. Certain departments have improved on this front recently, but there is a long way to go before Health Catalyst has the pieces needed to scale to multi-billion dollar company.
3) Market. While the healthcare analytics and improvement market is incredibly interesting, it is also very competitive. In my opinion, Health Catalyst is the leader in the healthcare data warehousing market, but it has a ways to go to becoming the healthcare analytics leader. Epic, Cerner, Optum, etc. are competing to provide healthcare analytics to health systems, physician practices, and ACOs. Some of these organizations have unique advantages (providers having $100M+ invested with them, owning the clinical/administrative workflow within providers, etc.) so Health Catalyst needs to continue to invest in professional services and product development that can compete with these organizations. That said, Health Catalyst needs to know when to say no to certain initiatives. Health Catalyst can’t say yes to everything so the company needs to be honest with itself and push off certain investment areas to a future date. Health Catalyst is now a medium-sized fish in a big pond and it will take a lot of strategic investment to become a market leader, but the market is worth the investment.
