Vienna · Available Globally

What the system made unsayable.
I learned to say it.

Ten years ill. Seven bedridden. The medical system didn't know what to do with me — so it made me invisible. I became obsessed with that invisibility. Now I spend my life making it visible.

Watch the TEDx talk → Book a talk →
27
Countries
7
Books
20k+
Clinicians Trained
2×
Patient-in-Residence
The backstory that is the qualification

Built through it.
Not despite it.

Roi Shternin — patient expert, author and keynote speaker, Vienna
Roi Shternin · Vienna, Austria

I was sick for ten years. Seven of them bedridden. The medical system didn't know what to do with me. So it did what systems do with things they can't categorize: it made me invisible.

I became obsessed with that. Not bitterly — curiously. Why do people with something real to say go unheard? What actually happens in the gap between what someone feels and what they can say out loud, in a room that has power over them?

Find what the system made unsayable. Say it.

Fifteen years inside that question. Training 20,000 healthcare professionals across 27 countries. Teaching 15,000 patients — most of them exhausted, dismissed, invisible — how to speak when everything is working against them. Advising pharma on what patient voice actually means. Writing seven books. Being the first patient placed inside a medical research institute — at Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and Sheba Medical Center — not as a subject, but as a voice.

I still have ME/CFS. I still have POTS. I still know what it is to perform wellness you don't feel, in rooms that need you to be fine. The work is always the same: find the gap. Name it. Build inside it.

TEDx Talk
AI in Healthcare:
The Invisible Patient

Healthcare AI is being built on data that was never designed to describe the most complex patients — people with chronic illness, invisible disability, or a history of being dismissed by the system. We are encoding our failures into the tools we think will fix us. This talk asks what it would take to build AI that can actually see the patients it's supposed to help — and what we lose if we don't.

Watch on TED.com →
27
Countries where this argument has landed
20k+
Healthcare professionals trained on patient voice
10yr
Living inside the gap this talk is about
Keynotes & Workshops

Four talks.
One unflinching argument.

01
AI in Healthcare: The Invisible Patient

Healthcare AI learns from data that systematically excludes the most complex patients. What are we optimizing for? What gets left behind? A talk for healthcare organizations, health tech companies, and anyone building systems that are supposed to serve people they can't see.

TEDxAI & HealthPatient Voice
02
The Invisible Patient

What do healthcare systems know how to see — and what do they structurally cannot see? The gap between patient experience and system measurement isn't a bug. It's a design decision. This talk names it, and then asks what changes when you stop pretending it isn't there.

KeynoteHealthcarePatient Experience
03
Voice Recovery: Speaking When Systems Listen Selectively

For clinicians, patients, and anyone trying to be heard inside an institution that wasn't built to hear them. A talk and workshop on narrative, power, and the specific courage it takes to say what you actually think in rooms that have power over you.

WorkshopCommunicationPatient Advocacy
04
Building Through Constraint

What do you do when you can't operate at full capacity — and you never could? How do you lead, create, and build when your energy is genuinely limited? A talk about constraint-based thinking, sustainable innovation, and why limitation is often the clearest path to clarity. Built from ten years of living it.

LeadershipInnovationChronic Illness
Published Works

Seven books on the gap between what patients feel
and what healthcare hears.

Revolution From My Bed
How chronic illness rewired everything Roi thought about work, identity, and what it means to build something real when you're not okay.
Memoir · Chronic Illness
What Do Patients Want?
Not what they say in focus groups. Not what the data captures. What they actually want — and why the gap between that and what healthcare delivers is where the real crisis lives.
Healthcare · Patient Experience
The Algorithm Will See You Now
A critical look at AI in healthcare — what it can do, what it cannot see, and the patients it will leave behind if we don't ask harder questions about what we're optimizing for.
AI · Healthcare · Technology
The Little Book of Patient Communication
Compact, practical, honest. What actually works when clinicians and patients try to understand each other — and why most communication training misses the hardest part.
Healthcare Communication
The ABC of Public Speaking
From someone who had to relearn how to speak after years of isolation: what it actually takes to find your voice, hold a room, and say something true under pressure.
Speaking · Communication
The Complete Pocket Guide to Medical Appointments
A practical guide for patients who've been dismissed, confused, or talked over. How to prepare, how to advocate, how to leave with what you actually needed.
Patient Advocacy · Guide
Active Projects

Building inside the constraint.

Patient Education
Spooniversity
A university built for chronically ill patients. Real education — not pamphlets. 6 schools, 7 majors, 15 courses. 17-minute modules designed for limited energy. Flare Mode for bad days. No deadlines. Because sick people deserve to learn.
spooniversity.org ↗
Healthcare Professional Education
Centric.MBA
System fluency for healthcare professionals. 4 tracks, 30 lessons on EHR architecture, FHIR, clinical AI, health data science, and genomics. 20–25 minutes per lesson. Practitioner-to-practitioner. Every lesson ends with something you can apply this week.
centric.mba ↗
Developer Community
Bedcoders
A community for developers with chronic illness. Because coding from bed is still coding. And the tech industry has no idea what it's missing by not building for people who can't show up at full capacity.
Learn more ↗
Patient Data & Community
Spoons World
A patient data and community platform where lived experience becomes legitimate knowledge. Patients are the largest untapped data source in healthcare — and they deserve to own what they contribute.
spoons.world ↗
Writing

Writing without performing it.

I write about chronic illness, healthcare, and what it means to build something real when you're not okay. Not for algorithms. Not for platforms. Honest essays about the invisible things that matter — the gap between what people feel and what systems let them say.

rois.life is where I think out loud. Chronically is where the essays live. They're different — but they're the same voice.

Read at rois.life →
rois.life
Projects, thinking, now updates. Making the invisible visible — one project at a time.
rois.life ↗
Chronically
Essays on chronic illness, healthcare, and building through limitation. Writing without performing it.
chronically.life ↗
LinkedIn
Professional writing on patient voice, AI in healthcare, and what breaks when systems fail people.
linkedin.com/in/roishternin ↗
Work Together

Let's find the gap.
And say what it needs said.

I'm available for keynotes, workshops, advisory work, and consulting with healthcare organizations, patient advocacy groups, pharma, and health tech. I work from Vienna and speak globally. I'm also honest about capacity — if energy is limited, I'll say so.

hello@roishternin.com
See the talks →
For keynote bookings, I'm represented by AAE Speakers Bureau.