Why Innova exists

I didn't plan on this work.

I spent years as a Shift Lead Operator at a chemical plant, and I served as an EMT and Lieutenant with the volunteer fire department there. That's where I learned what the details cost. In emergency work, the thing you missed is the thing that hurts someone.

I came to medical coding by chance. After an injury, I came to it full time.

What struck me was how much rides on documentation nobody sees. A chronic condition that's real, actively managed, and treated — but written up in a way that doesn't hold — disappears from the record. The patient's care picture the following year is built on an incomplete story. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because a note didn't say clearly what the clinician already knew. That gap bothered me enough to build a company around closing it. The answer isn't catching it after the fact. It's helping providers document what they're already doing.

The second thing I noticed was how coders get treated.

Contract shops hire two hundred people, call them full-time, and cut them loose on a random Tuesday when the project ends. Good coders string together side gigs between contracts. That's not a talent problem — it's a structural one.

So our education isn't about teaching one client's way of doing things. It's about building coders who can pivot: read a new set of guidelines, adapt to a different payer, move between project types, and stay employed year-round because they're genuinely versatile. If we do this right, working with us should make someone more employable everywhere, not just here.

The third thing is the tools.

A coder shouldn't have to choose between a decent encoder and their grocery budget. Six hundred dollars a year for software you open every single day, when you might be between contracts, is absurd. We build affordable tools for coders at every level. That's not a loss leader or a marketing strategy — it's the point.

Where that leaves us

Three divisions: coding and review services, education, and technology. All of it centered on HCC and risk adjustment, though we handle full capture as well.

One company, built by someone who's done the work, for the patients whose records deserve accuracy and the coders who deserve better than a phone call on a Tuesday.