Philipp von Gilsa, CEO of Kontakt.io
Photo: Philipp von Gilsa
Hospitals have plenty of data, but it can take teams and weeks of work to get insights crucial to hospital operations. As a result, leaders rely too heavily on spreadsheets, consultants and high-level assumptions to make decisions, said Philipp von Gilsa, CEO of Kontakt.io, vendor of a care operations platform that works with RTLS data.
At the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exposition this week in Las Vegas, Kontakt.io has unveiled a new tool called Curiosity Engine. It is an AI system designed to turn fragmented hospital data into decision-ready intelligence in minutes, von Gilsa said.
RTLS data meets EHR context
"Curiosity Engine unifies RTLS data with EHR context in real time, providing data-driven answers to strategic questions in minutes, not months," he continued. "For example, a CNO can simulate networkwide scenarios, determining where to add beds or flex staffing, and how it affects ED boarding and systemwide transfers. A CFO can model site-of-care shifts like orthopedics-to-ASC and determine how they impact enterprisewide financial margins.
"The typical hospital generates about 50 petabytes of data each year, yet approximately 97% of that information is never analyzed due to fragmented systems, manual processes and long analytics cycles," he said. "Curiosity Engine closes that gap by giving executives a conversational partner that reasons across live operational data. Every response comes with a confidence score, so leaders can weigh uncertainty before acting."
This new AI system has been designed to empower leaders to challenge the status quo, with questions that spark their curiosity, turning a potential two-week wait time into a two-minute conversation, he added.
"Most health systems sit on enormous data assets they barely use," von Gilsa noted. "They know how many patients moved through the ED last quarter, but they can't quickly model what happens if they convert an underutilized unit into a short-stay observation area.
"The practical outcomes are direct: Smarter capital allocation by modeling scenarios before committing spend; improved throughput by identifying bottlenecks in real time, rather than in retrospect; and faster alignment across leadership because everyone is working from the same evidence base," he continued. "When a system is debating a $40 million expansion, the ability to model downstream effects across departments before breaking ground changes the quality of that decision."
Power and governance
And because the platform is built on enterprise-grade security with isolated data environments, health systems don't have to choose between analytical power and data governance, he added.
"Strategy becomes iterative – leaders can test three scenarios over lunch, instead of commissioning a six-week study," he concluded.
Kontakt.io is in booth 1961 in the exhibit hall at HIMSS26.
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Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
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