Health Catalyst reviews

3.4

45% would recommend to a friend

(780 total reviews)
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Ben Albert

Not enough data to show CEO approval

24% positive business outlook

Health Catalyst has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 780 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Health Catalyst employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Healthcare industry (3.4 stars).

Reviews by job title

780 reviews
1.0
Aug 25, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The people there are amazing. Nearly everyone is nice, helpful, and a team player. The executive team is transparent and is led by a CEO that truly cares about each team member and strives to be understanding. They try to promote a work/life balance and flexible PTO.

Cons

The COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected the employee experience at Health Catalyst. Promotions and raises were put on hold, 401(k) match was paused and ultimately reduced, and bonuses were dismal with the decision to base them off pre-COVID standards. Though Health Catalyst tried to be accommodating to workers that had to watch their kids during the shutdown, they consequently diverted more work to those that either do not have kids or were in a situation where they could still work throughout the day. Achieving a work/life balance is encouraged. However, there were many times (even before the pandemic) where the demands of work got to a point where a balance could not be achieved. In my situation, there were many weeks where I worked well above 40 or 50 hours and still had some managers discourage time off to meet outrageous deadlines. Despite these conditions, Health Catalyst reassured their employees by saying it could always be worse and pointed to companies that were severely struggling due to the pandemic. They conveniently did not talk about companies that were still excelling and experiencing great years either through circumstance or adaptation. Nearly all of Health Catalyst's post-IPO policies have been to protect their bottom line. They still proclaim that their employees are their top priority, but when backed into a corner, cuts had to be made to keep promises to investors. The only reassurance given were vague promises to make up for these cuts once the bottom line improved to a higher level without any explanation of what this level needed to be. To exacerbate these issues, there is a cult-like attitude from many of the Health Catalyst employees. Perhaps these apologists benefitted from the years of plenty before the IPO or have found themselves by luck or connections in a good spot. Either way, these employees quickly jump to the defense of Health Catalyst when legitimate concerns are raised and shower the C-suite with praise for these tough decisions. Dan, the CEO, does try to address and take seriously every concern an employee raises, but those that defend every decision of Health Catalyst are persistent and strive to negate or disregard their fellow teammates' concerns. Health Catalyst often uses leveling and compensation to attract employees with experience elsewhere while current employees are expected to only level up every few years. This results in new hires coming in and being compensated more than current employees with similar backgrounds and experience. Health Catalyst does claim to promote from within, but omits the fact that many of these promotions are given to employees that have only been with Health Catalyst for a short period of time. Complaints around this are always met with an assurance that every employee is compensated and leveled appropriately. In my situation, the first offer outside of Health Catalyst amounted to over a 35% cash raise or 20% when you look at total compensation. In response to this, Health Catalyst offered no apology or acknowledgement of their miscalculation of my compensation.

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Health Catalyst Response
4y
Thank you for your review and feedback, and I'm glad to hear that you are happy in the new role that you've pursued. I apologize for the delay in providing a response to you. Let me address some of the items you mentioned, that applied more at a company level. First, I'm glad to hear of your positive experiences with the people at Health Catalyst, and I appreciate your kind words directed towards me. I'm also glad to hear that the flexibility was a positive for you. I also wanted to acknowledge, and apologize, that we have gotten behind as it relates to the base salary component of compensation, in a number of roles at Health Catalyst, over the past year. This clearly was the case in your situation, and I regret that this occurred in your case, as I regret it in every other case at Health Catalyst. I also want to acknowledge, as we have done many times in all team member meeting discussions, that we do have financial constraints within which we need to operate in order to keep the commitments we've made to public market investors. These constraints are often more significant than what some earlier-stage companies may face, where there is not a near- or ever mid-term expectation for profitability. But eventually, every company that will survive, must become self sustaining financially, and as such, this needs to be a foundational objective for every company that seeks to be "built to last" and not just "built to flip." Being built to last is certainly our ambition at Health Catatlyst, which made the company's achievement of positive Adjusted-EBITDA in Q2 of 2021 such a meaningful milestone. What we've committed to do is to share as much as we can, as soon as we can, from a compensation perspective, as we succeed as a company. In tomorrow's all team member meeting we will be sharing specific actions and timelines associated with this sharing, including in terms of increases to base salaries, spot bonuses, companywide bonus performance, and annual equity grants. I'm grateful we're in a position to take these actions which will positively impact every team member, but I regret that we weren't able to put these things in place soon enough for you to also benefit from them. Having a longer-term mindset and commitment in both directions is a foundational element that we talk a lot about at Health Catalyst, and that longer-term approach doesn't always work for every team member, which is understandable. We've also strengthened our ability to recognize extraordinary individual performance, and to have ways of approaching unique situations with more flexibility. Here again, I'm glad we've made progress here, but I regret we had not made enough progress soon enough for this to directly benefit you while you were at Health Catalyst. At any rate, I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn from your experience and then to strive to continuously improve. And I'm happy that you're thriving in your new role. Best, Dan
2.0
Jul 30, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I believe the employees at Health Catalyst truly embody the Health Catalyst way - we are smart, hard working, humble people. We care about the success of our clients and want to make a difference in the world using data to drive better decision making in healthcare. The pay is really good. In fact, if it wasn't for a good salary and the genuine, caring people who work here, I would have left years ago.

Cons

With the above said, the Professional Services division of the company needs some serious house cleaning. Product Managers don't have roadmaps for their products, don't announce product features regularly, don't clearly track or manage bugs, or have a process where people (clients and employees) can request new features. In fact, many teams can't really agree on what their product is, or does, or offers. You're expected to make it up as you go along. If you want some supporting documentation and direct a client to HC Community, our client facing web tool, it's a mess of links to old, out dated, poorly written materials. Somehow, product managers aren't responsible keeping this information up to date and written professionally. I'm not impressed with the leadership in Pro Services and neither are my peers. Are these managers really good at getting client adoption of products for the long run, or good people managers? Two different things. What publications are product managers reading? Do they share that information in a collaborative way to build trust? Do they pay attention to how other software companies conduct themselves and communicate information, and try to replicate that on their own teams? Do product managers follow software development best practices? I see none of this. Further, there is no clear way to express our frustrations with the incompetency seen here. Culturally, the Professional Services leadership team and Hiring Team is made up entirely of white men, with the exception of one female executive. The Pro Services division receives an email from this group every two weeks and none of the information communicated reflects the work I do, or the changes I want to see. Despite cultural pressure internally and externally to reflect on why representation in this needs to change, nothing really changes. Who decided the group should be made up of leadership team members only? Probably the leadership team. A recent "re-org" in Pro Services resulted in the layoffs of a few people and shifting of others into new roles. Some of that shifting meant people were promoted into positions with significant responsibilities and not surprisingly, these people are white men - longtime employees. Time and again as certain people are promoted, roles are shifted, teams are formed, and workgroups are established, women and minorities are sidelined to Affinity Groups. We watch as poor decisions are made, work is disorganized, products struggle, clients asks hard questions we can't get answers for, and simple tasks like documenting materials are largely ignored. We will never be a first rate company as long as this is allowed to continue.

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Health Catalyst Response
5y
Thank you for sharing this perspective and feedback. Your experience certainly does not reflect what we strive for at Health Catalyst. There is some challenging feedback in your review; I will try to address three of the primary themes in your response. The first theme I believe I heard relates to inclusivity, and more specifically, the need to avoid bias in the making of decisions, including key leadership hiring decisions. I want to first share that this is an area in which we strive to be world-class, and we acknowledge that we have much more work ahead of us to achieve this important goal. I am encouraged both by the increased focus on standard hiring processes companywide, and by the rollout of training to identify the implicit biases each of us may unknowingly bring to the decision-making table. I believe strongly that inclusivity is one of those topics, the importance of which cannot be overstated. I want you to know that we are deeply committed to getting much better in this area. Secondly, you shared feedback related to Product Management at Health Catalyst. As you are likely aware, we launched our Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) and New Product Introduction (NPI) processes several years ago to bring a higher level of product management discipline and rigor to all new product development, business justification, planning, forecasting, pricing, and all marketing activities associated with bringing a new product to market. Using the PDLC and NPI, we hope that the market, our Clients, and our Team Members all gain a clear understanding of each of our products, our services, and the improvement we strive to enable across major financial, operational, and clinical areas of healthcare. Your feedback points to some areas for improvement in these areas, and I appreciate the time you have taken to highlight specific ways we can do better. You also shared several ways in which you believe the Professional Services division of our company can improve, including communication. In this area, I encourage you to be courageously transparent with us. In each of these biweekly communications (which I receive as well), I see some consistent language repeated: “These emails are intended to increase communication, invite discussion, and seek feedback.” I agree with each those communication objectives, and I encourage you to share your thoughts for improvements to this periodic email with your Manager, any Senior Leader, myself directly, or via our anonymous “Ask Leadership Anything” page on Spark. Finally, if you would be open to a private 1:1, my assistant Jenn Howard can help us find a time to connect remotely. Thank you again for sharing your perspectives, and I apologize that you your experience at Health Catalyst hasn’t measured up to our company’s values and mission. Best, Dan
3.0
May 31, 2018

Great ethos, mediocre execution

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

One thing I took away from my time at the company is to "assume the best intentions" of my coworkers. The company touts this and I think tries to live it.

Cons

Some individuals abuse the company's assumption of positive intent as an excuse to get away with being bad employees and bad people.

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Health Catalyst Response
8y
Thank you for your sharing this perspective. I'm glad to hear you felt that most teammates tried to live by the principle of assuming positive intent. I'm sorry to hear that you encountered examples where some team members abused that trust and did not seem to face the consequences of these choices. We do have a stated performance management policy that includes providing team members with a second chance, when there has been a performance issue. However, this should not be an excuse for not addressing performance issues. We'll reinforce this message in our next manager training meeting. Thanks again for sharing your experience and perspective. Best, Dan
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Glassdoor has 843 Health Catalyst reviews submitted anonymously by Health Catalyst employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Health Catalyst is right for you.