About PostOp Navigator

We built this because nobody was watching.

After discharge, surgical patients go home and surgeons go dark. Phone calls get missed. Wound photos get texted to personal cells. PostOp Navigator and IncisionIQ exist to close that window. Permanently.

68%

of SSIs present after hospital discharge

CDC/NHSN SSI Surveillance Data

Up to 90

days of post-op wound risk for implant cases

$4.6M

average verdict in missed SSI malpractice cases

PIAA Physician Insurers Assn. Data

algorithmic layers powering every wound review

Our Story

Born from a gap nobody wanted to name

The idea for PostOp Navigator didn't come from a boardroom. It came from a pattern — a recurring, maddening pattern that anyone who's spent time around surgical care will recognize immediately.

Patients discharge with a packet of instructions, a follow-up date three weeks out, and a phone number that rings to a voicemail. In between, the 30-to-90 day window sits entirely unmonitored — no structured check-in, no photo protocol, no clinical escalation pathway. Just hope.

"The surgeon did everything right in the OR. What failed was the 23 days nobody was looking."

We built IncisionIQ to give that window a structure. Not to replace the surgeon's clinical judgment — but to make sure that judgment has something to act on. Every photo. Every check-in. Every day.

Leadership

Mike Lofton

Co-Founder & CEO

Built by someone who watched the gap cost people

Mike didn't arrive at PostOp Navigator from a conference room. He arrived from years in medical device sales — watching surgical teams spend $30,000 to $50,000 in wound biologics trying to salvage an infected knee that should have been caught weeks earlier. He saw firsthand what delayed escalation actually costs: not just in dollars, but in the clinical window that quietly closes while no one is watching.

That experience reoriented everything. He went on to co-found and lead an orthopedic specialty clinic, where the post-discharge problem became impossible to ignore. Wound photos came in by text. Patients called with answerable questions that had no structured home. Early warning signs slipped through because there was no surveillance infrastructure to catch them. The pattern was consistent enough — and the consequences serious enough — that ignoring it stopped being an option.

PostOp Navigator is what that gap looks like when someone finally decides to close it.

How We Got Here

The path to IncisionIQ

The Insight

Identifying the post-discharge void

Researching CDC/NHSN data confirmed what years on the ground already suggested — 68% of SSIs present after discharge, yet no scalable monitoring infrastructure existed for outpatient surgical recovery.

The Architecture

Building from the clinical layer up

IncisionIQ was designed from the ground up — procedure-family intelligence, Fitzpatrick skin tone equity, surgeon signature learning, and a human-in-the-loop RN triage layer that ensures AI flags never reach a surgeon without clinical review.

The Standard

NHSN-grounded, FDA-positioned

Every scoring model maps to published CDC/NHSN criteria. The platform is built as non-device clinical decision support software — clinically defensible from day one.

Now

Launching with Founding Clinical Advisors

IncisionIQ enters its inaugural clinical phase with a practicing orthopedic surgeon and a high-volume plastic surgeon whose cases are informing the platform from day one. The longitudinal wound dataset is being built right now.

Clinical Leadership

The Surgeons Behind the Algorithm

IncisionIQ was built in clinical partnership with practicing surgeons — not around them. Our founding advisors shaped the algorithm's procedure-specific logic, its equity framework, and the standard of evidence it holds itself to.

Orthopedic Surgery

Founding Clinical Advisor

Dr. Joseph D. Boaen, MD

Andrews Institute Fellowship · Medical College of Georgia · Savannah Orthopedics & Sports Medicine

A born-and-raised Savannah orthopedic surgeon whose credentials trace a straight line from elite athletic competition to elite surgical training. A two-sport varsity athlete at the University of Pennsylvania — two-time Academic All-Ivy League, team captain in baseball — he graduated Cum Laude before answering a calling to medicine.

Inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha as a third-year medical student at the Medical College of Georgia, he went on to finish in the 100th percentile on the Orthopaedic In-Training Examination in his final year of residency at UTCOM Chattanooga. He then completed his Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Fellowship at the Andrews Institute in Gulf Breeze, Florida — under the direct mentorship of Dr. James Andrews, the most celebrated sports medicine surgeon in American history.

Since founding Savannah Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in 2022, Dr. Boaen has built a practice defined by a simple conviction: that the surgeon's job is to create the conditions for the body to heal — and that what happens after discharge is not an afterthought. It is the standard of care.

Plastic Surgery

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Clifton Cannon III, MD

Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon · Miami, Florida

Before establishing his high-volume Miami practice, Dr. Cannon built his reputation in Savannah as a reconstructive surgeon of rare distinction — becoming the first surgeon in the region to perform DIEP flap breast reconstruction, a technically demanding free-flap procedure that requires microsurgical precision and carries one of the most complex post-operative wound profiles in all of plastic surgery.

That reconstructive background led him into the management of major surgical wounds — including cases where surgical site infections had already taken hold and required aggressive intervention. The cost of delayed detection, seen firsthand at the tissue level, is what informs his clinical perspective on IncisionIQ.

Today his Miami practice runs a high volume of body contouring and aesthetic procedures at a dedicated ASC. His advisory role brings the full arc of that career — from microsurgical reconstruction to high-throughput outpatient surgery — to bear on the procedural specificity that IncisionIQ's plastic surgery coverage demands.

"To make the 30-to-90 days after surgery the most monitored, most documented, and most clinically supported period in a patient's recovery."

Our Mission

How We Build

Principles that don't move

⚕️

Clinician First

Every wound flag passes through a licensed RN before it reaches the surgeon. AI identifies. Clinicians decide. Surgeons act.

⚖️

Equitable by Design

Fitzpatrick skin tone calibration is built into Layer 3 of the algorithm from the start — because erythema looks different on different skin, and missing it costs lives.

🔒

Documentation is Protection

Every check-in, every photo, every clinician note becomes a timestamped, defensible record. The absence of documentation is not neutral. It is evidence.

Ready to see it in your practice?

See how IncisionIQ maps to your specialty, your procedure families, and your post-discharge workflow. Thirty minutes. No pitch.

Request a Demo