About
The work began in a bed.
Seven years horizontal. Thirty-three doctors. A body that stopped working and a system that told me I was imagining it. I was a paramedic who couldn't walk. A teacher who couldn't sit up. A person who had spent his career helping other people name invisible things, now unable to name what was happening inside his own body.
I eventually diagnosed myself. POTS — Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. A real condition. A real explanation. Invisible to everyone who had looked.
The illness was the beginning of a question, not the end of one: what do systems fail to see?
I've answered it three ways. I built — founding eight organisations and serving as Patient in Residence at four major health institutions to create what didn't exist for patients like me. I wrote — seven books on patient experience, clinical communication, and the human cost of automation. And I developed a methodology — Testimony-Based Presence — practiced now in 27 countries, built on the premise that when one person stops performing, the room changes.
These aren't three careers. They're three idioms for the same inquiry. I walk into those rooms now. And I go first.
The Methodology
Twenty-five years of practice across 27 countries, in classrooms and boardrooms and hospital corridors and conference halls, produced a methodology.
I've been an instructor since I was fifteen. A teacher. A paramedic trainer. A patient advocate. A workshop facilitator. A keynote speaker. At every stage, I arrived at the same place through a different door: the moment when a room full of people who came in performing left having said the thing they needed to say.
I've given that practice a name: Testimony-Based Presence.
The principle is simple. When one person in a room stops performing — publicly, embodied, at genuine cost — the room's permission structure collapses. People say things they came in not planning to say. They discover they're not alone in the specific shape of their stuck. Something moves that was blocked before.
That's the methodology. The container is The Honest Room.
The Work
Patient Advocacy
Eight organisations founded — from Dysautonomia Israel to Spooniversity — building what the system hadn't built. Patient in Residence at Sheba, LBG, and Health Hub Vienna.
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AI & Digital Health
The gap between what algorithms optimize for and what patients actually need. Advisory work at the intersection of chronic illness, health tech, and the limits of automation.
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The Room
In four formats: Meetup, Intensive, Corporate, Continuum. The public meetup runs as The Honest Room.
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Keynotes
TBP at scale. 45–60 minutes. For when the room is 500 people instead of 12. The methodology doesn't change. The intimacy compresses.
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Writing
Seven books on patient experience, clinical communication, AI in healthcare, and the cost of invisibility. The written tradition behind the methodology.
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The Institutional Context
The Organizations
Roi has founded eight organisations across patient advocacy, health technology, and education.
See the organizations →The Lineage
This work belongs to a tradition.
Martin Buber distinguished the teacher who transmits from the witness who testifies. Roi studied Buber in two university courses and has been practicing I-Thou encounter at room scale ever since — without knowing it had a name.
David Bohm, William Isaacs, Edgar Schein, Carl Rogers, and Otto Scharmer each contributed to the intellectual foundation that TBP draws on.
The full academic paper on Testimony-Based Presence is available on request.
The Personal
Roi Shternin lives in Bruck an der Leitha, Lower Austria, with his wife Theresa and their daughter.
He speaks English, German, and Hebrew. He has spoken in 27 countries. He has authored seven books. He is a nine-year veteran of emergency medical services in Israel.
He runs sprechcoaching.com with Theresa.
He was born in Israel. He lives in Austria. The work travels.
Ready to stop performing?