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Thank you for this thoughtful review and feedback. I'm very happy to hear of the positive elements of your experience thus far at Health Catalyst, and thank you for your kind words regarding the leadership team. I agree with you regarding the talent and dedication of our teammates, and I'm also happy to hear that the benefits are positive.
I also very much appreciate your feedback regarding the bonus structure of the company. And I acknowledge that there is downside to our current bonus structure which, for many years now, has been nearly entirely focused on companywide performance. I believe there are many positives of this team-based approach to bonuses. But there are also downsides, and as we grow and mature as a company, it's important for us to be open to updating and changing "practices" while also remaining true to "principles". Over the years I've tried to think carefully about whether the team-based bonus is closer to a "principle" or a "practice", and we have debated this as a leadership team as well. In a recent 1:1 with a long-time colleague, teammate and fellow-leader at Health Catalyst, we had an interesting and reflective discussion of learnings along the way of our nearly decade-long work together at Health Catalyst. One of the learnings I shared was the realization that almost every topic and decision of significance turned out, when I really understood it, to be along a spectrum, rather than being more "digital" or clear-cut "yes" or "no" or "always" vs. "never." Navigating through where we should fall on a spectrum, with an acknowledgement of ambiguity, judgment, and decisions based on limited data, has been an experience that has repeated itself thousands of times throughout the years.
And the structure of the bonus is also on this spectrum. I believe the way we approach the bonus is a practice that can and should be modified over time as our circumstances change. As we make updates to the bonus, we should also be informed by and guided by a balanced view of timeless principles. Perhaps all of this is a convoluted way of sharing with you that I'm open to and in the process of pondering, with active dialogue with our leadership team, how we might consider evolving the bonus structure over time to potentially include some individual-specific components. And I also would like to move towards a more consistent higher-percentage-of-target bonus payout over time, which is also extra challenging as our company also works towards profitability.
One of the benefits of moving to an annual bonus payout cadence is that this provides us with some time and space to consider the bonus structure, and to potentially utilize some of 2020 to iterate on some ideas that can inform our structure moving forward. We'll discuss this more in depth during today's All Team Member meeting, and will keep working on this in the weeks and months ahead. I do believe there may well be a place for a portion of the bonus to be based more on items that an individual has more direct control over, with another portion remaining tied to the companywide performance.
Finally, thank you for your encouragement regarding transparency. We'll try to actually increase our transparency and frequency of communication in challenging times like our current COVID-19 situation, with weekly all-team-member meetings and written updates from me every few days, in addition to encouraging all managers to conduct weekly video one-on-ones with every team member. We will make it through this and many other challenges, together, in the weeks, months and years ahead. Thank you again for choosing to join Health Catalyst! Best, Dan
