Innova Health – The “Why?” That Drives Us Forward

We started Innova Health with a clear purpose: “To develop a simple, yet powerful EHR solution for Senior Care Therapy that helps clinicians provide better care for aging adults – throughout the care continuum.” Our end result of that mission was to “help therapists be therapists,” by reducing their online time… to create more patient time. Also significant, we wanted to build the tools, intel and innovations necessary to drive more cost-efficient outcomes and greater operational performance.

We didn’t go into this mission blind. We knew it was going to be hard, capital intensive and time-consuming. But our team was up to the challenge, and the industry was hungry for change. With the help of our committed Customer Advisory Board, we used a clean slate approach and set out to build a more intuitive, more progressive EHR system that could meet the needs of an increasingly complex therapy world. The result?… a faster, easier, more powerful approach to Electronic Health Records that better satisfies the needs of operators, along with the physical, occupational and speech therapists who are foundational to our industry.

As a new entrant to the market, it’s important to define our technology and the philosophies behind it, as well as the ways Innova Health differs from current systems. It starts with our “why” and how it inspired us to think differently to create better solutions for the industry we so passionately care for. We defined our primary purpose in the first sentence of this article. Supporting that objective, are seven critical factors below that inspired our “Why.”

1. In recent years, technology has moved at an incredibly rapid pace, but EHR technology has not. In fact, the healthcare industry continues to operate on twenty, and sometimes thirty-year-old technology stacks with obsolete workflows. This legacy technology forces a myriad of workarounds and inefficiencies that increase administrative burden for clinicians and operators. Advances in cloud computing, low-code and other technologies now enable us to build faster and at an enterprise level scale – right from day one. With the right infrastructure in place, we can bring solutions to market more rapidly and tackle the problems providers face in a more agile and incremental fashion. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to advance the industry in a variety of exciting ways. Unfortunately however, without the right EHR infrastructure to build on, it’s just not possible to optimize this promising technology for our industry, and patients.
2. The Senior Care Therapy industry has been without “freedom of choice” for too many years due to corporate consolidation. Typically, consolidation of this nature does not favor the consumer, or in this case, rehab providers. Lack of competition stunts innovation, while pricing tends to favor the conglomerate. Further, responsiveness and service often falter when the incentive to support customers wanes. We started Innova to reset the competitive landscape and drive more innovation (hence our name) in an environment where rehab providers are desperately trying to survive and thrive in a more difficult environment, while delivering better care for patients. We’re encouraged to see new therapy related EHR entries dip their toe in our industry, as it will challenge all competitors to deliver better value for customers.
3. We knew therapists were spending way too much time on their EHR systems, particularly with documentation. Our own industry surveys concluded that therapists spend approximately 4-6 hours on their EHR system each day. A large portion of this time is focused on documentation. To make matters worse, the user experience with current systems was poor, with respondents reporting challenges around efficiency, speed, and workflow. Our research also confirms that therapist’s EHR experience can compromise job satisfaction, contributing to therapist burn-out and attrition. In an environment with significant labor challenges, and a shortage of therapists versus patient demand, the industry simply cannot afford to see clinicians leave the field. We strongly believe that a more efficient, more intuitive EHR system can improve their experience to improve job satisfaction and retention.
4. EHR systems are the heartbeat of a rehab provider’s organization, and it’s critical this technology remains a benefit, not a hindrance. It’s where clinicians spend most of their time… documenting patient care, entering clinical information and assessing key patient data. At the same time, it’s where management extracts this vital clinical metrics and translates them into actionable insights focused on patient care and operational efficiency. Based on our market research, it’s evident that both therapists and operators needed a faster, easier, more powerful approach to entering, gathering, and analyzing this critical data.
5. In recent years, senior care therapy providers have diversified their services into multiple clinical settings to maintain efficiency, revenue and profit. Unfortunately, however, the providers lack the technology and tools needed to operate effectively across this broader care continuum. Current EHR solutions were designed for one setting which requires significant workarounds and/or multiple systems to accommodate additional clinical settings – creating further inefficiencies for clinicians, managers and operators alike. It was time to rethink and reimagine how providers can deploy care across multiple clinical settings and develop a single platform that can operate seamlessly in all of them.
6. Advances in technology now enable data to be more effectively and efficiently shared between EHR systems and other critical Apps, but the legacy systems currently in use don’t provide these modern API integrations. Interoperability has made giant leaps in the past ten years thanks to other technologies and companies advancing this field (to the interoperability pioneers reading this article, thank you – you know who you are!). These technologies and standards (e.g., FIHR) need to be incorporated into EHR systems so the exchange of data between providers and patients can be more seamless. In today’s age, there’s little excuse for an EHR system to become a “data” bottleneck, slowing and in some cases restricting the transmission of data among providers, EHR systems and patients. When the ecosystem is well connected, therapists and providers can do their jobs easier and more efficiently to achieve more desirable outcomes.
7. We think there’s been a failure to “listen,” and Innova Health has a sincere interest in partnering with rehab providers to identify new innovations that can advance senior care therapy. We know we can’t drive innovation in our own lab. To this day, our product has been built on the back of the feedback received from our Customer Advisory Board, pilot partners and our early adopter base. We listened, and we will continue to respond to our customers to better understand industry challenges and emerging needs. Within this reciprocal partnership, our hope is to produce more user-friendly solutions that can drive better patient outcomes and improve operational performance.

With these driving forces in mind, we’re proud to have this opportunity in front of us. At Innova Health, we strongly believe that EHR systems are the “heartbeat” of the provider organization, and an important conduit for better patient care. We’re inspired by the potential that senior care rehab holds, and how technology is instrumental in its ability to effectively and efficiently care for America’s 75 million aging adults.