The system is a network of hospitals, outpatient services, assisted living and long-term care facilities, and healthcare centers in the Northern Virginia market.

In March 1988, Inova opened the Cameron Glen Care Center nursing home in Reston;[19] and merged with the nearly 125-year-old Alexandria Hospital in July 1996.

[29] For a few years previous, health care provider Kaiser Permanente had been moving away from referring its subscribers to Inova facilities, instead fostering relationships with Reston Hospital Center in western Fairfax County and Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington.

[32][33] After several years of planning to expand into the field of genomic medicine, Inova announced in February 2015 that it had signed a 99-year lease with an option to buy for ExxonMobil's 117-acre campus in Merrifield, intending to use the property as the site for the Inova Center for Personalized Health, a facility to provide research, education and patient treatment through therapies tailored to the individual patient based on their genetics.

[36] On April 9, 2018, J. Knox Singleton retired as CEO of Inova Health System naming J. Stephen Jones, MD as his successor.

"[38] Starting in 2015, Inova hired private military contractor Allied Universal to provide security guards with de-escalation training], to help prevent violent incidents.