Recently, Health Fidelity was named a Top Workplace by the Bay Area Newsgroup. The list is compiled by a third-party research group who analyzes employee opinions about all areas of company culture that make a workplace appealing and rewarding.
First, I want to say how invigorating this is for us. We’ve put a lot of effort into building a welcoming, productive environment at Health Fidelity and we are seeing the results. Health Fidelity’s average turnover in 2020 was nearly half the national average (32.67% vs. 57.3%), a stat that didn’t just hold, but has improved through 2021. This is good in general, it’s downright exceptional in tech, with a notoriously higher turnover rate than most sectors. So when Energage confirmed that our staff overwhelmingly values our climate via anonymous feedback we were thrilled. We also ranked pretty high, 15th out of 46 in our category, which also earned us the top ranked healthcare tech company on the list.
In between us learning about our placement and the public announcement, we took the time to reflect on what we’ve done to be named a top workplace and what we want to build upon going forward. These three pillars are integral to who we are and what we’ve built together:
- Cultivating a purpose-driven mission that resonates with our team
Risk adjustment is a complex part of value-based care, but often misunderstood or even unheard of outside of specialists, despite its critical role in providing healthcare that touches about a third of Americans. It’s not necessarily a glamourous part of healthcare innovation. It takes a great deal of dedication, motivation, and intellect to tackle at all, let alone continuing to drive in an industry. When you add in the nuance and complexity of continuously refining, optimizing, and developing AI-driven solutions with modest resources, the pressures can be incredible. Nonetheless, we’ve connected our work to the greater good of reshaping care and we regularly reinforce this notion in our quotidian processes so our team understands the bigger picture at stake.
- Emphasizing and living our values
Our core values are a significant part of our culture, (In brief, contributing to the greater good, leading the way, personifying virtue, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation). This really came to the forefront during the pandemic in the patience we extended to each other, the transparency we brought to companywide meetings, and how we all rallied around our focus on building useful technology. When telehealth received its emergency exception under risk adjustment, the team expanding our NLP to identify patients that were strong candidates for telemedicine and offered that for free to our partners.
- Fostering remote camaraderie
As I’ve discussed previously, this wasn’t an overnight transition for us. Yes, we were already a third remote, and we had strong infrastructure in place to support transitioning the rest of the way, but still we had a lot of adjusting to do. Since the full, COVID-instigated transition, we’ve held a slew of video conference-celebrations, holiday talent contests, photos, happy hours, and our now ongoing “Hackchella” series. Our head of HR Betsy Brookes emcees weekly (optional) coffee talks that have become an incredibly popular space to swap out media, and our internal tech teams have expanded the tasks and social options via Slack. Finally, we do what we can to ensure our standups and all-hands each accomplish as much as they can with as small of a time footprint as possible to give people the freedom they need to accomplish their goals each day. It shows in feedback, as well. While studies found that 46% of employees felt less connected to their company, and 42% said that company culture had diminished since the start of the pandemic, we continue to hear the opposite. Our team feels that the speed and transparency of our response, and ongoing efforts to help people feel connected but not burdened, deepened dedication to colleagues and the mission hear at Health Fidelity.
To the Health Fidelity team, thank you and congratulations on being a top workplace. I’m proud of what we’ve done and what we can still do collectively and hope to climb even higher on the Bay Area Newsgroup list in 2022.
