Kontakt.io on NYSE TV: How Access Agent will Boost Outpatient Clinic Efficiency by 20%

Philipp von Gilsa was recently featured on NYSE TV, where he spoke with reporter Ashley Mastronardi about Kontakt.io, and how Access Agent goes beyond dashboards to orchestrate rooms, teams, and assets.

Ultimately, Philipp explains, the goal of Access Agent (and the Kontakt.io organization at large) is to lower the cost of care while raising its quality.

Read on for the full transcript, or watch the video here.

Ashley: Joining me now to share more is [Kontakt.io founder and] CEO, Philip von Gilsa. Welcome to the New York Stock Exchange.

Philipp: Good morning, Ashley. Thanks for being here.

Ashley: So you understand that the Time “Person of the Year” is the Architects of AI; so you technically are one of the Time People of the Year! First of all, tell us what Kontakt.io is doing.

Philipp: So first of all, when you told me this just before we started, I said it’s the team, and I want to put that on camera as well. So Kontakt.io is essentially doing one thing from a mission perspective. We are here to lower the cost of delivering care while improving it at the same time.

We’re focusing on the premises of the four walls of the hospital. In other words, what we do from a technology perspective is we’re using real-time sensor data, combining it with EHR and existing systems information to then go into operations, what I call the boring stuff, the nonclinical domains, where we optimize resources, staffing, workflows.

Ashley: Alright, what are some use cases? What is the technology doing inside of hospitals?

Philipp: So I think our use case domain falls into three different buckets. We have fixed assets, which is essentially the space — or think of it as the walls of the inpatient rooms, where we’re trying to see how we can improve utilization through patient flow. Then we have the domains of asset [management] and supply chain optimization, where we go in and we try to track equipment and see how we can improve utilization patterns by optimizing distribution workflows.

Last but not least, there’s the domain of staffing and staff workflows. And here, it’s all about trying to understand what are the right ratios. How do we provide nurses the information where somebody is at any point in time to then improve the workflows they execute?

Ashley: And you just launched Access Agent, an agentic tool. Can you share more about what Access Agent is doing?

Philipp: It’s essentially a co-pilot for outpatient access. And here, again, we’re not so much focusing on the scheduling piece of it, but more the actual premises of how the physical space, how the clinical exam rooms, are actually being utilized.

What you see is that in the last 20 years, the clinical exam room has always been optimized on paper. We use scheduling data, and we try to optimize based on patterns that we’ve seen. The reality is, if you take real-time data, you take sensor information from how space is actually physically being utilized at any point in time, you have a new data set that allows you to improve things such as templates, dynamic rooming.

And so that’s one of the key domains we’re going after right now, as it’s one of the biggest pain points. I’m sure you’ve been exposed to that when you try to book an appointment and you’ve been waiting for a very long time. Very often, some of these inefficiencies (how space is being utilized) can be uncovered and unlocked if we use a new data set of data, which we can then apply AI to.

Ashley: How does this play into the mission and vision of Kontakt.io?

Philipp: So we talked about the mission. Let’s speak about the vision here for a second. At the end of the day, I’m building the platform on which care operations run. And we believe that if we combine the view of the digital together with the physical world, then we are capable of orchestrating resources in real time.

Instead of providing more dashboards or more software interfaces that are, in fact, interrupting workflows, we can nudge and take decisions on the spot and influence behavior, which at the end is all there to lower waste or the reduction of waste, and at the same time, improve patient care and the outcomes that these hospitals provide.

And so when I’m thinking forward, it’s really partnering with the CIOs and CEOs who are deployed in hundreds of hospitals and taking that to the next level and going into every single aspect of resource orchestration in a hospital.

Ashley: And in our last 30 seconds, you started this company with the mission to improve healthcare. What made you start this? What inspired you?

Philipp: If you look at the overall cost of healthcare, it’s been one trend: it’s a line that has been going up. And I feel for a society that is sustainable, that is healthy, that trend can’t continue. A lot of the things that we’ve been trying to do in the last 20 years is essentially turning the same screws and buttons, and it doesn’t work like that.

There needs to be a fundamental shift of how we operate and run hospitals, clinics, etc. I think the fundamental data behind that is we need a real-time operating view of these spaces…that’s been sort of a driving force for the last 10 years, and we’re looking forward to the next 10.

Ashley: Philip von Gilsa, CEO of Kontakt.io, thank you so much for joining us at the New York Stock Exchange.

Philipp: Thank you so much, Ashley.