There is an old mistake in health technology: confusing the person who needs a product with the person who can buy it. A patient may need it. A clinician may use it. A state agency may regulate it. A health plan may pay for it. A hospital committee may veto it. Somewhere in that procession sits a procurement officer whose calendar has already declared war on your quarter. Innsena built a consultancy in the distance between all those people.
From Atlanta, the firm helps healthcare technology companies and community organizations enter, compete in, and shape markets. The service list sounds familiar at first - business development, strategic communications, reputation management. Then it veers into government and policy advocacy, stakeholder coalitions, and market intelligence. That overlap is the point. Innsena is neither a standard PR shop with a healthcare practice nor a policy firm that happens to edit press releases. It works the whole exterior of an organization: the story, the allies, the agencies, the buyer, and the weather around them.
The company dates to 2017, when Kat Kovalchik McDavitt founded a healthcare-only communications agency. Leslie Kirk now serves as CEO and managing partner; McDavitt is president and founding partner. Kirk's résumé includes strategy work for more than 150 health-tech companies, while McDavitt's path ran through communications, health information exchange, public affairs, and the successful exit of Collective Medical. The combination created an unusual instinct: before amplifying a product, ask whether the market around it is capable of hearing.
The first thing to wobble was the money
In 2023, private digital-health funding was becoming a less dependable engine. Innsena's response was not a dramatic reinvention. It was a change in mix. McDavitt has described a deliberate effort to balance privately funded clients with government-funded programs, especially Medicaid and public health. Her observation was simple: when private money declines, public money often increases.
Private digital-health capital tightened, making venture-backed demand less reliable.
Increase the share of work tied to Medicaid, public health, agencies, and government-backed programs.
That is where a communications firm began to look more like an external-affairs firm. Public health is not one neat customer category. Medicaid changes by state. Health information exchanges sit inside local histories and regulatory arrangements. A useful product can still fail because no coalition wants to carry it, no policy tailwind supports it, or its founders cannot name the precise problem in language a buyer will repeat.
“Often when you see private money decline, you see public money increase.”Kat McDavitt, on Innsena's 2023 shift
Innsena's market-access work attacks those obstacles directly. It builds relationships with regulators and agencies, recruits stakeholders around shared goals, prepares policy positions, watches legislation, and connects those signals back to commercialization. The communications side then gives the coalition a story. In an industry crowded with “seamless,” “interoperable,” and “AI-powered,” specificity is a commercial advantage.
A six-part product with no software login
Innsena sells expertise, not a platform. Its current offer has six connected parts: government and policy advocacy; stakeholder engagement and coalition building; business development; strategic communications; reputation management; and market intelligence. A client might begin with positioning and discover that its real constraint is state adoption. Another might arrive with a policy opening but no credible group of supporters. The job is to find the binding constraint, then assemble the right disciplines around it.
The business model matches the work. Innsena favors retainers and durable relationships over a three-month campaign followed by a hopeful shrug. Its sweet spot has been described as Series A through Series C companies that can afford a sustained partnership, though the client base also includes public agencies, nonprofits, health plans, health systems, and information exchanges. The firm's website displays names including CDC Foundation, Dimagi, Nursa, CRISP Shared Services, Wondr Health, PointClickCare, The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic, CyncHealth, Relatient, and Contexture.
The alternatives are easy to name but hard to compare cleanly. A general communications agency can create attention. A management consultancy can map a market. A public-affairs firm can work policy. Larger healthcare specialists such as FINN Partners, Real Chemistry, JPA Health, Avalere, and Chartis cover pieces of the same terrain. Innsena's claim is that healthcare's external problems arrive bundled, so the response should be bundled too.
The $100,000 proof of intent
In February 2024, Innsena put a price on its thesis. The firm contributed $100,000 to CancerX, a public-private effort using digital innovation to improve cancer care, and became its first Impact Supporter. McDavitt and Kirk framed it as the first of four initiatives they would fund or lead for vulnerable populations. For a small, bootstrapped consultancy, the amount was not decorative.
The same year brought a different kind of validation. A team comprising CyncHealth, PointClickCare, and Innsena received an $80,000 Phase 2 award in the federal Racial Equity in Postpartum Care Challenge. The Nebraska program used health-information-exchange data to identify at-risk mothers and improve follow-up. Here was Innsena's model in miniature: technology, public infrastructure, multiple institutions, a defined population, and an outcome too important to leave trapped in somebody's sales deck.
There are conventional trophies too. Innsena and client work collected five top MarCom Awards in 2024, followed by seven awards and two honorable mentions in 2025. The second set covered writing, editorial strategy, media relations, pro bono work, and a campaign based on the firm's survey of more than 100 health-tech reporters. In 2024, the Atlanta Business Chronicle ranked Innsena number 30 among the city's fastest-growing private companies.
The copyable part is a sequence, not a slogan
Innsena's playbook is useful well beyond health care, provided it is copied at the level of decisions rather than aesthetics.
- Name the precise market. “Public health” is too broad; cancer, opioid-use disorder, maternal health, and reentry care create sharper coalitions and clearer stakes.
- Separate the user, customer, buyer, regulator, and champion. In complex markets, they are often five different people.
- Follow durable demand. When one capital pool contracts, inspect the adjacent public, philanthropic, or regulated market before cutting the core capability.
- Choose a niche and stay in it. McDavitt's warning to founders is memorable: a company making a different flavor every day eventually discovers it has switched from soup to chili.
- Use a retainer only when the work compounds. Relationships, credibility, and policy access become more useful over time; a short engagement can interrupt that curve.
The approach also has boundaries. It is poorly suited to a founder who needs a quick launch, cannot support a long engagement, or has not yet found a stable product and customer. Relationships cannot repair weak evidence. Policy fluency cannot make an undifferentiated product necessary. And a healthcare-only specialty pays off only when the team possesses real operating context; adding “health” to a generic deck will not reproduce Innsena's network.
The firm's culture is unusually blunt about that realism. Its four pillars are Think, Nurture, Act, and Mission. Under Mission sits the line “no margin = no mission.” It is less sentimental than the average purpose statement and more useful. Profit funds patient work. Focus protects reputation. Long relationships create access. The circle works only if every part holds.
The product is not publicity. It is the ability to make a complicated market legible - and then introduce the people who can change it.
The useful lesson is narrower than it looks
Innsena did not discover a secret pool of easy government money. It chose a harder market with durable needs, then accumulated the policy knowledge and relationships required to serve it. That distinction matters. The model works when an organization can wait for trust to compound, when its product solves a specific public problem, and when leadership is willing to keep the offer narrow. It fails when “market access” is treated as a euphemism for introductions or when mission is expected to substitute for a commercial case.
Healthcare's loudest companies are often the easiest to notice. Innsena's bet is on the quieter machinery - state programs, data-sharing agreements, public agencies, community groups, and buyers who cannot move at launch-day speed. The machinery is frustrating. It is also where a great deal of healthcare actually happens.