Advisory
Quiet work. Mostly under NDA. Sometimes the most important thing I do.
I work as a patient expert, advisor, and research collaborator for organisations who need someone who understands the system from inside both ends — as a former clinician and as a patient who lived inside it for a decade.
This isn't speaking. It's not teaching. It's a different mode.
What this looks like in practice
For pharma and MedTech
Strategic input on patient engagement, product design, clinical trial recruitment, communication strategy. Sometimes a single conversation that reframes a project. Sometimes a long-running advisory role across a programme.
For healthcare systems
Patient experience strategy. Diagnostic pathway redesign for invisible and rare conditions. What "patient-centred" actually requires when patients are too unwell to advocate for themselves.
For founders
Especially founders building for chronically ill or disabled users. The accessibility decisions you don't know you're making. The market you think you understand but don't yet. The tone that signals "this was built for me" versus "this was built about me."
For research consortia
Patient perspective on study design, recruitment, and what counts as outcomes worth measuring. The Ludwig Boltzmann work and the JMIR paper are examples of what this can produce.
For government and policy
EU AI Act compliance in health. Patient data interoperability. The gap between policy intent and implementation. The questions nobody is asking yet.
What I bring
Nine years as a paramedic.
Ten years as a patient.
Twenty years of working on the gap between them.
Seven books of thinking.
A research paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
A codebase.
Fifteen-plus ventures built or building.
A teaching practice across 27 countries.
And one specific thing that's hard to find: a person who is fluent in clinical language, in patient experience, in the operational realities of a healthcare organisation, and in the codebase of the tools being built into all of it.
How this works
Email. We talk. If it's a fit, we figure out scope. If it's not, I'll tell you who might be a better person.
I take on a small number of advisory engagements at any one time. The constraint is energy — I have less of it than most advisors, and I budget it carefully. That constraint is also why I'm useful: I've optimised for high signal in low energy. It's the same skill I teach.
How to start
talks@roishternin.com
Tell me what you're working on, what you've already tried, and what specifically you think I might be able to help with. The clearer you are, the faster I can tell you whether I'm the right person.