Roi Shternin

1998–2006

Paramedic.

I joined the Israeli Red Cross at 18. Nine years of emergency calls in Tel Aviv. I learned what bodies do under stress. I learned what families do at 3 a.m. I learned what a doctor sounds like when they're tired, when they're scared, when they're hiding it well, and when they're not hiding it at all. I didn't know yet that I was building a database I would later need from the other side.

2007–2014

Patient.

My body stopped working. The system said I was imagining it. Ten years from first symptoms to diagnosis. Seven of those spent mostly in bed. Thirty-three doctors along the way, before I found the answer myself. I taught myself medicine from a bed because the alternative was to die without a name for what was killing me.

In 2014, I walked a senior doctor through a two-minute argument with the evidence I'd compiled. He ordered the test. The test was positive. The diagnosis was POTS — postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It had been there the entire time.

That's the moment I learned the most expensive thing in medicine isn't the wrong treatment. It's the years between when something becomes visible and when somebody names it.

2014–2018

Builder.

I rebuilt my body. Methodically. Not a miracle. A rehabilitation.

While I was doing that, I started building. The Patient School. Dysautonomia Israel. Then the others. Fifteen-plus ventures in total, all aimed at the same gap. They weren't separate projects. They were the same project, attacked from different angles.

In parallel, I founded Israel's first academic TEDx event and went on to co-found two more — TEDxHIT and TEDxShenkarCollege. I was building rooms for other people's ideas years before I stood in one myself.

2016

The first stage.

TEDx Shanghai. I'd never spoken in public. I gave a talk called Revolution From Your Bed. It went further than I expected. People wrote to me from countries I'd never been to. I realised the gap I was naming wasn't unique to me — it was structural, global, and almost entirely unspoken.

I started travelling.

2018–2024

Speaker. Teacher. Author.

Over thirty thousand professionals, patients, and audiences across twenty-seven countries. Boehringer. Takeda. Novartis. Sheba. The Vatican. PwC. Dell. Medical schools. Pharma boardrooms. Patient organisations. Universities.

Eight books. Revolution From My Bed in 2024, the memoir. Ten Seconds in 2026, the AI book. The others in between — patient communication, public speaking, the pocket guide to medical appointments. One argument, refracted through eight different lenses.

In parallel: a Master's in International Health and Social Management from MCI Innsbruck. A Bachelor's in Education from Kibbutzim College. Patient in Residence at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute — the first one they've ever appointed. Lecturer at IMC Krems.

2025–2026

The codebase.

I started writing software. Local-inference AI agents that read patient experience data without sending it to the cloud — not as policy, as working code. Selected by Dell as a Precision Ambassador for AI in health and life sciences, one of two health voices among 24 global ambassadors, building a PED Pattern Intelligence Agent as a public demonstration of what's possible without sending sensitive health data to the cloud.

This part of the work doesn't fit on a speaker bio. It fits on this page.

Today.

I keynote, facilitate, teach, advise, write, build, and game from my sofa with friends most evenings because that's what an honest day looks like for me. I can do all of that AND I am still a person with a chronic condition that decides what I can give on any given day.

Both things are true. That's the whole point.