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Patient expert · Author · Keynote speaker

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 → Work together →
27
Countries
7
Books
20k+
Clinicians Trained
2×
Patient-in-Residence
The backstory that's actually the qualification

Built through it.
Not despite it.

Roi Shternin — patient expert, author, and keynote speaker based in 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 in 27 countries. Teaching 15,000 patients — most of them exhausted, dismissed, invisible — how to speak when everything is working against them. Advising pharmaceutical companies on patient voice. 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

What happens when AI systems are trained on data that was never meant to describe us? What do we lose when algorithms learn to optimize for what's measurable instead of what matters? Healthcare AI is being built on a foundation that systematically excludes the most complex patients — the ones with chronic illness, the ones who don't present typically, the ones who've already been made invisible once. This talk asks the hard question: are we encoding our failures into the systems we think will fix us?

Watch on TED.com →
Keynotes & Workshops

Four talks.
One unflinching argument.

01
AI in Healthcare: The Invisible Patient
Healthcare AI is being built on data that was never designed to capture the full complexity of patient experience — especially for people with chronic illness, rare disease, or systemic dismissal. This talk explores what we're encoding into the algorithms, and what it will cost us if we don't change how we define what counts as data.
TEDx AI & Health Patient Voice Healthcare Innovation
02
The Invisible Patient
What do healthcare systems know how to see? What do they structurally cannot see? This is a talk about the gap between patient experience and system measurement — and why that gap is exactly where real innovation has to happen. Based on 15 years training clinicians and patients across 27 countries.
Keynote Healthcare Patient Experience
03
Voice Recovery: Speaking When Systems Listen Selectively
For clinicians, patients, and healthcare communicators: what does it actually take to find your voice inside an institution that wasn't built to hear you? 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.
Workshop Communication Patient 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? This talk draws from Roi's own experience with chronic illness and the projects he built from bed. It's about constraint-based thinking, sustainable innovation, and why limitation is often the clearest path to clarity.
Leadership Innovation Chronic Illness
Published Works

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

Revolution From My Bed
How chronic illness rewired the way Roi thinks about work, identity, creativity, and what it means to build something meaningful 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 · Online Platform
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. Financial aid available. Because sick people deserve to learn too.
spooniversity.org ↗
Professional Education · Healthcare
Centric.MBA
System fluency for healthcare professionals. 4 tracks, 30 lessons, 20–25 minutes each — designed for clinical schedules. EHR architecture, FHIR, clinical AI, health data science, genomics. Practitioner-to-practitioner. Every lesson ends with something you can apply this week.
centric.mba ↗
Developer Community · Chronic Illness
Bedcoders
A community and education platform 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. Because 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. Just honest essays about the invisible things that matter.

My newsletter goes to 15,000 people who are sick, searching, or building something in difficult conditions. I write about identity, systems, parenting through pain, and what constraint-based thinking actually feels like from the inside.

Read the essays →

Chronically

Essays on chronic illness, healthcare, and building through limitation.

chronically.life ↗

rois.life

Making the invisible visible — one project at a time.

rois.life ↗

LinkedIn

Professional writing on patient voice, AI in healthcare, and healthcare systems.

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. Healthcare organizations, patient advocacy groups, pharma, and health tech. I work from Vienna and speak globally.

hello@roishternin.com
See the talks →
For keynote bookings, I'm represented by AAE Speakers Bureau. I'm honest about capacity — if energy is limited on a given week, I'll say so upfront.