AI Tool Promises to Reduce Length of Hospital Stays and Free Up Beds

Hospitals worldwide struggle with avoidable inpatient delays that extend length of stay, constrain bed capacity, and depress throughput. To help address these challenges, Kontakt.io has introduced Patient Flow Agent, an artificial intelligence–driven orchestration tool that predicts bottlenecks and coordinates next steps to accelerate safe discharge, aiming to cut stays by full days and relieve capacity strain. Part of the Kontakt.io Care Orchestration platform, Patient Flow Agent fuses real‑time location system signals from care operations with electronic health record data to build clinical context and next‑step predictability. 

According to Kontakt.io, the system reduces length of stay by full days by forecasting resource needs, bed availability, discharge timing, barriers, and dispositions across the care continuum, then initiating interventions that free beds and rebalance staff and assets. The company highlights the national efficiency gap—an estimated 22% of U.S. inpatient days are not clinically necessary—suggesting a 200‑bed hospital could realize about $4 million in annual cost savings and $3 million in additional revenue by eliminating avoidable delays.

For bed management, case management, and nursing teams, the tool aims to replace reactive bed huddles and static dashboards with proactive, EHR‑embedded prompts that standardize discharge readiness and smooth inter‑unit transfers—supporting earlier discharges, faster turns, and more reliable capacity during seasonal surges. 

"Hospitals don't have a bed problem; they have a patient flow orchestration problem," said Philipp von Gilsa, CEO of Kontakt.io. "Patient Flow Agent turns fragmented data into coordinated real-time action using existing EHR interfaces and workflows, and surfaces time-critical interventions."

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