Amazing benefits, but don't expect to actually improve health care - Analytics Engineer Health Catalyst Employee Review

3.0
Sep 16, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I could go on forever about the pros - transparency is amazing. We have meetings every 2 weeks where things like business strategy and Glassdoor reviews are addressed with the entire company (hi Dan!) I feel 100% comfortable bringing up concerns to leadership. Even if I don't always agree with the direction/decisions of leadership, at least I know their reasons (and their reasons are almost always with team members' best interest at heart). This company has values, and lives up to them unlike any other organization I've ever seen. They'll fight tooth and nail for their team members, no matter the cost. it's hard to express in text - I've just never seen anything like it. They actually make data-informed decisions. I kid you not! Everything in the company is remote friendly, so COVID-19 had practically no impact on my work. I have so much autonomy and feel like everyone within the company is accessible/willing to help when I have questions. As a brand new team member, so many more senior team members were willing to take time to answer my questions as they came up. The environment is very family-friendly and family-oriented as many team members are established and well into their careers. Most everyone is kind, and I haven't run into ego as a barrier very often. Some perks, just to name a few: generous cell phone allowance, internet allowance, home office equipment allowance of $1000, gym reimbursement, 3 months maternity/1 month paternity leave, week of 4th of July and week of Thanksgiving are holidays, flexible PTO, the list goes on!

Cons

- The company has a culture of "order taking" from clients. While we preach expertise, I have yet to meet anyone who is prescriptive in their approach to improving at their client site. Most analytics I've had to build aren't improvement related at all; just pointless client-specific report requests and data-dumps. It's very disappointing to join a company to fulfill an exciting mission, only to be let down that your work is just like working at any other hospital as analyst. - Health care knowledge is often more valued than actual technical skills. It was a little weird to me to be brought on as a junior team member when one of my team members at the highest pay-grade level in my organization had a hard time writing simple SQL queries. -Tooling is antiquated, and the culture of team members is resistant to change. We're still using QLikview as our primary analytics application, a tool that will be depricated soon, and lots of team members are digging in their heels about switching to anything else. - Expertise is not codified or wide-spread. You'd think after years of improving health care that there'd be well-known improvement best practices that were taught to new team members, but there has been no such thing. If we're trying to scale, our health-care improvement expertise needs to be taught to new team-members. Otherwise, I feel like I'm starting from scratch and will need 5 years in the company before I'm up to speed. - Your technical skills get dull if you only do client work - we're meeting hospital needs (20-30 years behind on technology) - don't expect to feel like a cutting-edge analyst. Catalyst provides a generous education allowance, but it's hard to take advantage of with client needs & duties. - It's very lonely to work here if you're newer - feels like there are several "in-groups" of early Health Catalyst joiners that all know each other, and I'm just a new-guy outsider. This has always been the case for me, even before the pandemic. - Project management is very scattered and disorganized, at least on the services side of things. Email is the primary tool used for delegating tasks and distributing information (Seriously? We're in the year 2020 now - there's no reason to send files through email & Trello is not that hard to learn/use).

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Health Catalyst Response
5y
Thank you for your review and feedback, and thank you also for choosing to join Health Catalyst 1-2 years ago! I appreciate your comments about the positives of your experience thus far, and am grateful to hear that you feel comfortable and safe sharing constructive feedback with leadership. That is incredibly important for us to maintain this comfort level, so that we can continuously learn and improve. Thank you also for the constructive feedback you shared. I agree that we have room for improvement in several of the areas you've highlighted, and we as a leadership team, and the Professional Services Leadership Team has been working in a concerted way, in 2020, to enable a transition in our whole mindset from "customer satisfaction" to "customer success." You'll hear more about this from Mike Doyle as he and the team work to codify the Professional Services strategy, but this is at the heart of the strategy. It is a critical pivot, and one that will take major effort on our part to shift away from being "order takers" to being strategic long-term partners that share what a client "needs" to hear, not necessarily what they "want" to hear. It should include us bringing all our capabilities and expertise to bear to enable our clients' success. I will also acknowledge, however, that this still requires the client to be ready for change. And even at our very best, we are Catalysts, but we require client partners who will also be courageous in working to improve, which is often uncomfortable and hard and requires taking some risk. While this is true, and while some of this dynamic falls outside our control, there is still a great deal that we can do to increase the likelihood that clients will be ready to do this hard work, with our full support and help. This dynamic is required if we're going to achieve our mission and enable massive improvement in healthcare. Please help us make this transition by speaking up, being courageously transparent, advocating with your clients for their success, not just for their satisfaction. Thank you again for sharing this feedback and for choosing to join Health Catalyst. Best, Dan

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Cons

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Pros

Great Talent & Culture: The people here are highly capable, collaborative, and committed to helping each other succeed. The partnership between onshore and offshore teams works well and is a real strength. There’s a culture of grit and stability that has helped the company navigate multiple major transitions over the years. Mission-Critical Engineering: The work involves complex data infrastructure that requires deep technical expertise. It can be demanding, but seeing these systems run successfully and support real-world operations is consistently rewarding.

Cons

Wage Compression and Retention Risk: Compensation for tenured and high-performing staff has not kept pace with the market for specialized data engineering and support leadership. In practice, tenure can feel undervalued or even penalized. This creates risk around losing institutional knowledge and operational continuity. Stagnant Career Progression: Contrary to stated expectations, strong performance ratings do not consistently translate into meaningful, market-aligned compensation growth. The process of how compensation is benchmarked lacks clarity in practice, obscuring how compensation decisions are made and what is required to advance.

5
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