Pros
remote work flexibility, work life balance was fine most of the time
Cons
I saw a LinkedIn post calling Valera Health a “telehealth mental health leader” recently, and I just had to laugh. Valera Health is a failed SaaS company turned soulless therapy mill. They attempted to create their own EHR for behavioral health, but it’s too poorly designed to meet internal needs, let alone serve external clients. There are so many duplicate patient records in Valera’s internal “care manager” EHR and no effort is being made to improve data integrity.
The data team reports to finance, which is such a bizarre arrangement. Leadership does not understand the difference between data engineering and software engineering so the data team has no data engineers. Besides the team lead and one FP&A guy, everyone who started working on the team during or before 2025 left by the end of the year, including a new hire who left on their first day. There is no roadmap other than responding to ad-hoc requests. There’s a top-down culture of “nobody has complained about this yet". There are mountains of tech debt that aren’t being prioritized. Needless to say, the technical side of the company is an absolute mess. I have serious doubts about the reliability of internal reporting.
The clinical side isn’t doing much better. I’m not a clinician and won’t attempt to speak to their experience. The many 1 & 2 star reviews on this page can do that for me. The company closely scrutinizes provider performance - “visits per provider day” is the main metric used to evaluate performance. When I was still at the company, 28 visits per week (5.6 per day) was the magic number (I believe a 45 minute appointment counts as 1 visit). This does not account for clinical supervision or admin time. Every telehealth company is metrics driven, but Valera Health makes it clear that visit volumes are the only metric that matters to them. The company’s only “clinical quality” initiative is pushing for frequent PHQ-9 completion because they have a contract with an insurer that incentivizes it. The company markets itself as a specialist in treating “severe mental illness” (SMI) but (1) SMI is a vague industry term that is applied inconsistently across different companies and lacks clinical validity (2) telehealth therapy is inadequate for treating high acuity patients.
The company has been experiencing crazy turnover for a while now. They laid off ~40 people at the end of September with no warning & no severance. Turnover has only gotten worse since then.
If you are looking for an environment that values innovation and mentorship, you will not find it here. If you genuinely care about patient outcomes, this is not the company for you. If you want to be seen as anything more than a number on a spreadsheet, this is not the company for you. If you care about long-term stability, this is NOT the company for you.
The company is a sinking ship. Anyone left should grab a lifeboat while they still can.