New AI 'Curiosity Engine' Targets Hospital Execs

The "Curiosity Engine" is built upon Kontakt.io's established platform for Indoor Journey Analytics, which uses IoT sensors and real-time location systems (RTLS) to track how patients, staff, and equipment move through a hospital. This provides the AI with a constant stream of granular data on everything from patient wait times to the utilization of specific medical devices. A typical hospital can generate 50 petabytes of data annually, but around 97% of it goes unused due to fragmented systems and slow analysis. The new AI tool aims to solve this by unifying data from various sources—like electronic health records and IoT sensors—into a single intelligence layer, allowing for immediate analysis. Founded in 2013, Kontakt.io has deployed over 4 million IoT devices and serves more than 32,000 users. The company has raised a total of $69.1 million, including a recent $47.5 million investment led by Goldman Sachs to specifically fuel its AI expansion in U.S. hospitals. The technology uses a machine learning-powered location engine to process data from Bluetooth LE tags and sensors, providing room-level accuracy on the location of people and equipment. This allows executives to ask natural language questions and receive answers with a "confidence score" that indicates the quality of the underlying data. For hospital leaders, this means replacing a weeks-long process of requesting reports from data teams with the ability to instantly ask questions like, "How can we optimize patient flow to reduce discharge times?" or "What has been the utilization rate of our new MRI machines this month?". The platform is designed to be HIPAA compliant, ensuring that protected health information (PHI) is isolated and not used for external model training. Major health systems like HCA, the VA, and Trinity Health are already using Kontakt.io's underlying platform to manage their operations.