DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - Intelligent Orchestration of Healthcare Operations (ft. Philipp von Gilsa)

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

On this episode of DGTL Voices, Ed interviews Philipp von Gilsa, CEO of Kontakt.io. They discuss his journey from growing up in Stuttgart, Germany, to becoming an entrepreneur in the healthcare technology space. Philipp shares his personal philosophy, emphasizing the importance of taking action and embracing serendipity. He details the evolution of Kontakt.io, a platform designed to improve hospital operations through intelligent orchestration, and highlights the pragmatic approach the company takes to solve real-world healthcare challenges. The conversation also touches on the importance of personal interests, such as music and winemaking, in maintaining balance and energy in life.

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Ed here, another edition of Digital Voices. Thanks for listening. We really appreciate it. And I think one of the reasons that we are top 10 on Apple Podcast for Technology is amazing guests like Philip von Gilso. Philip, welcome to Digital Voices. Thank you. I hope we'll keep your ratings up and we're not going to drop after this one.

Now I'm going to track it. I'll let you know. We'll make it entertaining. Phillips is cool because we have some great connects. We're both from Germany originally and actually in the same general region. And so that's kind of fun. Always like kindred spirits. And he's CEO of Contact and they're building the platform hospital care operations run on, which is like an RTS enabled AI. But we'll get to that in a little bit. But I just really thankful to have you on. Philip, we've interacted a few times,

and I think you're pretty amazing and insightful person. I'm glad you're serving in healthcare where we need a lot of help, right, with technology. So again, we'll jump into that. But Philip, the most important thing, everyone wants to know. What songs are on your playlist? Like, what kind of music do you like? You know, I know that was the first question,

and I did ask my wife if I should tell the truth or, like, pretend, you know, to give a different answer. Like, the honest truth is, I'm very much into hip-hop music and rap music across both sides of the pond in the U.S. and in Europe. And as of this morning, the first song on my playlist is from Dr. Dre. Nice. And it's part of the Tronic 2001 album. And we could talk about, you know, why that is the case. But I'm at the stage of my professional career where I'm not hiding anymore.

I'm very hip-hop. That's great. You're probably too young to know this band, but there is a band out of Germany called Craft Work. Did you ever hear of Craft Work? I know. It's like we have Kraftwerk. We have Ramstein. There's a couple of kinds of bands that are international.

Yeah, they started like the techno revolution back in the 70s. And what was gratifying, I always felt like kind of, I never felt validated to admit that I like this group called CraftWorks since I was like in junior high. But when I saw you two, I forget which tour they were doing. but one of the tours of you two, maybe five years ago, on the stage when Bono was talking about his greatest musical influence was the album from Craftwork. So he was a big craftwork fan himself, so I felt validated.

It's okay to admit that. No, it's like depending on where you are in Germany and you ask people what they're proud of, typically when you're in the South, they used to say, I think it's changing. And we're very proud of our automotive exports. That becomes political.

so we don't talk about it anymore. If you go to the north and you go to Berlin, they are very proud of electronic and technical music as an export. Like even back when it goes probably 40 years, where there was Chicago and Detroit and a lot of electronic acoustic music that kind of developed in the UK and then in Germany. Yeah, it's super interesting.

What about life message or mantra? Are there words that kind of guide you that you live by? So, you know, the funny thing is I have two kids. And when you start, one of them is five and one is one is one. And when you're becoming a parent and you're getting into that motion of like, you know, raising kids, you start not only verbalizing, but kind of writing down again like, okay, what is it that I want to kind of pass on and think? And there's a whole bunch of like, I want to say, you know, different things who can have much longer debates, but I'm just going to pick one that I live by, I think both, you know, in the personal life, but also in the professional life, which is. a quote, I can't really attribute to anyone, but it was brought to me probably 20, 25 years ago from, you will not imagine a teacher. And it goes, stuff leads to stuff, leads to stuff.

If you do stuff, you get more stuff, you do stuff, more stuff happens. And it's very, you know, simple. But I think it's the idea of you just have to put yourself out into the arena. And there's so much uncertainty. And you don't exactly know what's the path that's going to be taken. But just do it. like go out, do stuff, you know, speak to people. And that's going to lead to the next moment, the next moment. And I think that path of embracing serendipity and just kind of walking and pushing yourself out into the unknown has been, I think, a successful and a very rewarding personal principle that I'm, you know, trying to keep following. I love that. That resonates.

That leads to stuff is always what I tell. Folks like, ah, should we do it? Like maybe we think about it again. No, no, no. Let's just go. Things will take care of itself. I love that. It really resonates with me.

I'm going to remember that. Plus, we are putting together like a little booklet of everyone's mantras. We've done about 270 episodes of digital voices. So we have 270 different mantras. And we're going to put that out in a, you know, online form so people can look at it. I'd be happy. I mean, I wish it would be, you know, a wise philosopher. Like some don't really have any quotation.

But I think if you follow it, everybody feels it. It's this moment where you're like, Maybe at an event, you don't know somebody. Like, you don't want to get yourself out there, but like, just do it. And then very often I've met the most wonderful people that I'm working with, including or that I've married, including my wife, kind of following that principle. Yeah, there's no greater testimony than that right there. Philip, we already know a little bit about you, like growing up in Stuttgart and stuff.

Tell us about who you are. You know, what's your story from the beginning to what you're doing now? I'll do, you know, the very quick version of it. If you grow up in Stuttgart, typically, you know, your parents have the ambition for you to become ideally a mechanical engineer working on engines for Porsche or Daimlow for one of the big, you know, OEMs. And the idea of becoming a lawyer or a doctor like these, no other kind of, you know, high profile and steam jobs, a little lower than if I maybe look at kind of New York City where, you know, we're living right now. And I was never a great engineer. And so at the same time, though, sort of this entire region, you know, around southern Germany is really has flourished through entrepreneurship and through different people saying, hey, we could do this better. And like, you know, let me take this idea and let's create a business.

And so I think very early on I kind of embrace sort of that entrepreneurial spirit and how this led to, you know, contact A.O. and what we do today is sort of, you know, a bigger story. But I think two episodes in my life that have been sort of, you know, foundational, I think, to what I'm doing today is the first, having been an exchange student in the U.S., more than, you know, 20, 25 years ago, has really sort of, you know, opened my eyes towards, on the one hand side, entrepreneurship and maybe even more importantly, sort of what I call the frontier spirit. And I'm, you know, very deliberate with the term frontier spirit,

it because the mantra or the quotation of which state, the last frontier, Alaska. And so my exchange year was in a high school in Fairbanks, Alaska, where sort of highway number one ends and starts. And if you are, you know, a young German 14, 15 years old, and you're moving to the U.S., while that is maybe not the initial place you think of when you think about the U.S. and sort of a map, typically, you know, I was thinking of California and L.A. or like New York, it was an eye-opening and deeply rewarding experience that I think has really shaped my personal sort of frontier spirit because there's a lot of things where there's nothing defined yet. There's no rules in place and you're really out there saying, how should we do this?

And I'm becoming an architect of my own community, of my own surroundings, et cetera. The second item is, I think once I finish sort of my studies, I studied, you know, business and economics, what you typically do when you don't really know what it is that you want to do, you sort of at the end of this period. And I think I was sort of in limbo that I knew I wanted to do something of my own. I didn't know exactly what. And it was exactly 10 years ago where I met my co-founders, two engineers from Poland, that we're starting to work on technology that was helping visually impaired people navigate within buildings. It was the idea of how can we take the mobile phone

and make it location aware not only outside through GPS, but within the premises of a building, within the four walls, within the exact position of a room, of a floor, in a building. And I was fascinated by that idea, not only because I thought it was a very human cost to help visually impaired people, you know, get rid of the stick or the dog and help, you know, create a more inclusive experience.

But my head started spinning. What could you do? Like, how could you change, you know, entire industries with that information at and at your fingertips for whatever the type of process is doing? And, you know, 10 years later, while maybe we still do some pro bono projects helping visually impaired people in some domains, we are focusing 100% of. on hospitals, acute care, some outpatient, because we have learned that the operations

and operational inefficiencies that have to do with delivering care to patients could be fundamentally transformed if that information would be available in connection to existing EHR and other systems in how we think of orchestrating work. And that is what today is the mantra around Contact DO,

we are the leading platform and the fastest growing platform that intelligently orchestrates the back end of the hospital, the care operations, anything that has to do with, let's call it the non-clinical domains. So I answered your question. I think I've already talked a little bit about kind of forward-looking, but if I were to sum it up, I'm a traveler and an entrepreneur and I'm deeply sort of excited and drawn to sort of the unwalking paths and that's what's kind of filling me with joy yeah i love that philip and and before we leave the whole concept of exchange student so for our listeners just highly encourage our listeners to

get involved with exchange programs it's amazing i agree yeah we hosted six you know because i was always trying to stay close back to my roots to germany and my kids understanding the culture so five of the six came from germany and it was great we're still friends today you know some became doctors and you know I think we're in contact with probably four out of the six still today, like 20, 30 years later. And one of them was actually from Poland. So a lot of good natural connections. I think it's truly amazing. Like I think for me, that exchange in itself. I mean, that's the reason, you know, my kids are American. I live here. So it really has changed sort of, you know, my personal trajectory, obviously for many different reasons. But I do, feel to go to your different question.

I think, you know, you've asked you of like, what did I do a year in Taiwan? Right, right. Yeah. And I spent a year in Taiwan, you know, prior to moving to the U.S. Because our host family also took two exchange students. And one of them was from Taiwan. And so we became best friends. And I said, I'll see if I can, you know, find a fork in my path that, you know,

leads me to spending some more time in that part of the world. haven't met previously. I love it. Yeah. So yeah, so you were telling us the journeys that ultimately led to co-found Contact I.O. And what has changed? So when you first founded Contact I. And today, what has changed?

And then I want to talk a little bit about the benefits of Contact I.O. So 10 years ago, we're on a technology platform, first and foremost, that was looking to solve problems across domains, across verticals. And the baseline was this understanding of we know how to calculate location of mobile phones, of tags. Back then, Bluetooth became a big thing. So this entire idea of you take an Apple type of air tag, you slap it on, you know, a moving equipment and you can constantly see where things are.

And then technology advanced. So we can put it on people. We can put it on, you know, staff members. We can put it on patients. Right. So it was a very technological kind of value proposition. Our mission as an organization was to simplify the delivery of data. Now, 10 years further, and I think the break or the evolution probably happened

somewhere in between, maybe five, six years in, really shifted to saying we are not a technology company by design that is serving everyone. We want to be healthcare-centric. We want to be healthcare first because the problems, that we're facing around, especially the cost of delivering care in the U.S. are so big that it warrants a fully dedicated mission to address and to solve them. And so some time ago, we went through that entire kind of recreation of the business saying we have to change our mission state, but we have to stand what we stand for. Because if we are out there trying to solve that problem

of addressing a third of the ways and the unnecessary spend that is happening sort of at health care at large, well, we're only 150, 200 people right now. We need full focus. Like every morning to every evening, how can we provide better patient care at lower cost? And so I think that has been sort of the fundamental change from an organization perspective. We're currently deployed in hundreds of hospitals and thousands of care sites. And I feel we're probably only at two, three percent of sort of what's possible. And my ambition and vision, and that's probably the last domain, which has really changed, is that I want to build the platform that care operations, meaning the operational aspect

of delivering care is running on. Because what you have today is we have one, you know, the EHR EMR system where there is a lot of focus on, there's a lot of, you know, budget on, there's a lot of kind of key players. And then you have these thousands of different small. bits and pieces of outdated and new tools of software. And there is not a single place that helps you to intelligently orchestrate all the different resources, all the different aspects that at the end have to be in flow that have to be orchestrated in order to deliver care in the most effective way.

Yeah. You know, I've been deeply involved in hospital operations for many, many years and now today as a board member. And it's still the same challenges. The same challenges. And I said there's technology. I know there's platforms that can help. I'm not saying anything is going to,

a tech is going to come in and be, everything's going to be perfect. But we can certainly double triple efficiency. And it's so frustrated. And it's because it's fragmented. And so everyone's doing their own thing and the systems don't speak to each other. And there's not this platform like contact I.O. So I get it.

But Ed, I would even say, I would even add further, like I think, and this is now the practice. pragmatist speaking. It's like one of the benefits when I moved to the US, I had a whole bunch of people, you know, especially when we were in fundraising telling me, Philip, you need to like, need to make it, you know,

even more ambition, even more visionary. And I sometimes still have the tendency, like to shift back and become hyper-pragmatic because that's, you know, how I was sort of raised. Why I think this is a core asset and what we do today is that as part of how we provide value and how we kind of go in to these

sort of health systems is we're hyper-pragmatic. And pragmatism means it needs to be fast, need to provide an hard ROI fast, it needs to be very scalable, it needs to be easy. Like it can't be, you know, the change management aspect of things, the technology implementation, and that has all sorts of implications on the business model, on the pricing, on the technology stack. But our ambition and what I'm probably sort of the most proud of from a technology and from a contact your value proposition is that we have a proven

formula and success stories that show that within days and weeks of coming in, we unlock hard value while at the same time having a very forward-looking mission and vision where we partner up with these systems that is unlocking all sorts of capabilities and things within what you can do with AI today, tomorrow, etc. But we're not leading just with a big vision. And now, you know, I'm looking for the most visionary CIO to tune in and say, yeah, That's great. I wish I had time and I could focus on it. No, we come in today solving real problems. Yeah, that's great. Tell us about one organization where you've had some great success. I know that you're in a couple hundred, but tell us about one to give listeners just a sense of what the possibilities are.

So I give you one example and then I roll back for a second. I tell you what are the use case domains like thinking to that pragmatist sort of approach that we are typically solving. Probably, you know, the most relevant success stories to sort of the audience and the listeners is that Contact AO has implemented together with Health Trust and the broader HCA organization, the Contact DeO platform across every single hospital within the HCA network and has rolled it out across the enterprise in less than nine months. And I'm, you know, asking sort of a provocative question the other way around is what technology solution are you aware of in a hospital, in a healthcare environment? It doesn't matter what it is, right? That kind of rolled out sort of at that speed, right? And the reason we rolled out that fast was, A, because there was a real hard business case supporting it. So there was the financial desire to unlock these savings. as fast as feasible.

And B, because the contact A platform, in comparison to some of the legacy tech that has been, you know, more sort of in the RTLS and location domain, which we typically don't want to compare ourselves, have been built in a way that it just takes 15, 16, 20 times longer. So what other organizations did or were trying to do throughout the course of three, four years, we managed to squeeze in a much shorter time. So what is it actually that we do? What is it actually, what is that value that we deliver? Intelligent care orchestration being the overarching theme.

There are three buckets of use cases that we support and serve. The first bucket is broader bucket of asset management, medical equipment, management, that's sort of clinical engineering, supply chain, and the entire idea is we want to tag and understand every single piece. of equipment. Why? Because that information available, you know, two caregivers, two nurses, helps reduce time spent looking for stuff. And on the other hand, side, allows health systems that are under tremendous cost pressure to right-size the inventory needed to deliver care, and especially the larger the health system, shared equipment management services, like what do I

truly need within one hospital, within a division of hospital, becomes key. And if you think about it from a CEO and CFO perspective, everyone is aware of what's the utilization of the OR or the inpatient meds. And you get a 6am dashboard and you know exactly what's happening. What's the utilization of medical equipment? The supply chain at large makes up to, you know, 20, 30 percent of the P&L and the balance sheets alike. And you will be shocked that first you don't even know within all the details.

and then at best maybe utilization is in a 40-50% range. Why not 60? Why not 70? Well, you know, because it has always been like that. And that's where we come in. And then the economics behind this, very often equipment is rented. If it's being rented, it's even more expensive. So when you come in, you create that visibility and you provide information that allows

you to right size and take work away from, you know, the people involved looking for stuff. there's just an immediate ROI that you can unlock, right? The second domain is the domain of stuff, workflows, automation, and safety. Now we're moving from, you know, the equipment and capital resources to the frontline workers that are actually doing the work. I think the most pressing problem that we are solving right now is one around workplace violence prevention and stuff safety, the idea of providing a portable duress button that you can press.

The moment you press it, we locate you within three seconds and with, you know, room level certainty that information is carried back to, you know, physical security or the surrounding nurses so they can address for help, anyone who's been, you know, in healthcare or now I have to confess, like my wife was watching the pit. And she's like, yeah, they need contact they all. I said, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, because it's those kind of day-to-day moment. And I think it has become a C-suite priority to truly address with technology, some of the issues that address workplace violence and become part of the prevention problem. And then the last domain, and I'm closing here, is capacity.

Capacity is essentially revenue. On the outpatient side, it's access. But if we stay inpatient for a second, it's the idea of how can I improve patient flow at the end, reduced length of stay, and add additional capacity within the existing sort of resource frameworks that I have. And if you understand next to the EHR data that just provides you a clinical framework, including timestamps when specific notes have been taken, right, when you take that information and you combine it with the location information of a patient from admission to discharge, understanding exactly where

and how they've moved throughout the care delivery continuum, how equipment, space, you know, has interacted with them, you can start solving some of the very well-known problems in a much better way. There's always, you know, too many people at like Tuesday in the afternoon waiting in front of radiology, why? This is what you should do differently. The patient is actually leaving at the time of discharge, independent if the notes have been taken. We can already automate EBS to come in and start preparing the room and those, you know, reducing room turnover from maybe five to two hours. So it's in. domain of capacity. And if you do all of these things together, what I've just outlined, I'm

very confident. Everyone has three, four, five other ideas of what we've done differently. And we are that orchestration layer that at the end is the intelligence that feeds back into all the different systems and hope or has the ambition to, you know, provide a real-time operating system. Yeah, I love it. Hey, tell us about just sort of pivoting to leadership as well as things. that you do to sort of relax and recharge your batteries. Tell us about this wine-making scholarship program. Okay. So I think the first thing is what I do to relax is I move, I walk, and it's not just going to the gym, but I think New York is an amazing city to walk. Yes. Walking meetings, walking home, taking the bike, I think is critical. And then obviously, you know, not looking at your

phone, which is even more difficult than following, you know, a rigid exercise plan. I do have to confess that probably next to hip-hop, I do have, you know, a big hobby around wine and wine-making. While I was, you know, in my university years, my social engagement, what I did is I started harvesting wine on the properties of the university. Back then was illegal, but I went all the way through getting like the concessions from the state that this becomes a certified area. And we partnered with local winemakers to grow it, to harvest, to bottle it. And at the end, to sell it. And out of that, I created a foundation which started financing scholarships for

exchange students who wanted to come to Germany. And, you know, I think the vintage every year is like 200, 300 bottles. And we sell them for more money than they're worth. But it's a donation, if you will. And as such, we've been financing two scholarships a year for exchange students who want to come to Germany. I love that. ...local culture, including wine making. For your audience, whoever is going to be in New York or when we see at one of the events,

I'm always, you know, very keen to drink a good bottle of wine. Yeah, no, I'm going to look forward to that. just sparked this memory. And I don't know if this is a good wine or not. And maybe you'll, you'll have heard of it from Germany. But I think it was my parents' favorite wine. I think it's called cella swatza cats. So cellar black cat, swatsa cats, as I think is what it was called. Is it a wistling? I know. I don't think so. It was a red wine. I'm going back like 40 years now. It just had this memory because we had wine at the table, right? That's part of the culture oftentimes. Europe. And so that was one of the dominant wines at our table. Like I said, it's probably not a high-end.

I look it up. I haven't heard it, but it's also that, you know, wine is an, it's an infinite space. And only once you get into it, your knowledge how little you actually know about anything. Philip, this has been so much fun. I could keep going on forever. I wanted to pick your brain more on leadership. But we'll get to that another time. We talked about a lot of stuff, everything from hip-hop in the beginning. You're growing up in Stuttgart. in in south of Germany. You know, just I love the mantra. Stuff leads to stuff leads to stuff, basically. In other words, get out there and make things happen. Don't sit around.

We talk a lot about contact I.O. What did we miss? Or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word. I think if there's one thing I'd like to double down on, then it's, you know, I'm now quoting a friend, and I'm sure you've met him, Eric Larson, who, you know, really planted that seed in my,

had early on saying, look, at the end of the day, the cost of healthcare in the U.S. is too expensive. And that needs to be fixed. And there's a whole bunch of different things that support, you know, doing it. But at the end of the day, you know, if you're successful, Philip, the U.S. economy might shrink by 2% because that is way attributed to just the hospital's portion of the GDP that makes up of the total. dollar spent in that domain. And I feel we are now at a face with the adoption of AI, just such an exciting sort of point in time to truly do good and do something that's right and meaningful, not just for two, three years, but for 10, 20. I do feel if you do something for 10 years and

you know this, if there's not a deep kind of connection to the idea, to the purpose and with the people that you're doing these things, you had one point run out of energy. And I'm at the point where I probably have more energy than I had when I started or five years ago because we as an organization have really sort of ingrained that ambition of being part of sort of a macro change and a solution as such. And I felt like sort of sharing that energy and that mission is the most important baseline when working with anyone. Philp, this has been fascinating.

You're an incredible person, and I love what the whole mission and how contact IO came to be. Thank you for being our guest on Digital Voices. Thank you so much, Ed, for hosting. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Martt. If you enjoyed this episode,

subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.