Pros
Coworkers who genuinely care about patient welfare, despite all of Polara Health and their partner organization, Cognitive Function Development Institute (which is a scam), issues. Their salaries are low, and their benefits are fair. Otherwise, this is a great jumping point for other jobs, as its community-embedded status gives you a ton of exposure, clinical experience, and opportunities to make a difference in lower-income demographics.
Cons
Polara Health has management and leadership that are totally out of touch with the realities of rural healthcare. The organization further undermines itself by associating with the Cognitive Function Development Institute, with which they partner and is a total scam. The employees are barely trained and the few times they are supervised, they are supervised by unqualified and uneducated individuals out to promote themselves for profit, 80% of the time abusing medicare and Medicaid through questionable practices and paraprofessional interventions barign mixed results. Polara and partner CFDI spread their employees thin with logistically unattainable expectations, such as high client hour expectations with unreliable and geographically distant clients in tight timelines. Unsustainable, underappreciated, underpaid, undertrained, and sometimes dangerous. This is not an 8-hour job. With the charting, all the driving,etc, this is easily an 11hr+ a day job. Verde Valley and Prescott teams are totally disconnected and I'm glad CFDT fell apart in the Verde. It made a difference, but it was abusing its staff unnecessarily amid rampant, underqualified, and underfunded mismanagement, and even for a time, it operated against the law without full-time onsite supervision amid extremely high turnover. Assigning mobile therapists to isolated 3rd party locations without a buddy system and in frequent interaction with underage clients with criminal parents/guardians/other individuals was insane.