Advocacy
Health equity. Invisible illness inclusion. Mental health. The part of the work that doesn't send an invoice.
The speaking, advisory, and consulting work is how I earn a living. This page is the other half — the organisations I founded because they needed to exist, the institutional roles I took because someone had to, and the causes I keep returning to whether or not there's a client on the other end.
The two halves overlap constantly. This is just where the line gets drawn on purpose.
Founding and institutional roles
Founder, Dysautonomia Israel
2014
The first organisation in Israel for people with dysautonomia. Built because there was nothing — no support network, no shared vocabulary, no one to hand a newly diagnosed patient a map.
Founder, The Patient School
Active
Education infrastructure for patients learning to navigate a system that dismissed them. Not a business — a public good I keep running because it needs to exist.
Patient in Residence & Patient Innovation Manager
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute
Austria's national health research institute. The first Patient in Residence they had ever appointed — working at the intersection of research design, patient experience, and institutional change.
Patient in Residence
Sheba Medical Center
Ranked among the top 10 hospitals globally. Bringing the lived patient perspective into a system built primarily around clinical throughput.
Patient in Residence & Acting Interim CEO
Health Hub Vienna
Steering an organisation built to bridge patients, founders, and the health system, through a leadership transition.
Lecturer & Advisory Board, Health Sciences
IMC Krems University of Applied Sciences
Teaching patient communication and human empowerment to the next generation of healthcare professionals, and sitting on the board that decides what that curriculum should be.
The causes
Health equity
The years between when something becomes true for a patient and when the system is willing to act on it are not distributed evenly. Chronic and invisible conditions, the uninsured, the undiagnosed, and anyone whose symptoms don't photograph well on a scan wait longest. That gap is the thing I keep pointing at.
Invisible illness & disability inclusion
POTS, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, and the wide category of conditions that don't announce themselves in a waiting room. Workplace inclusion, DEI and belonging work, and the specific cost of performing being fine so that other people don't have to deal with the fact that you're not.
Mental health & burnout
Compassion fatigue in clinicians and caregivers. The psychological safety required for someone to say "I don't know" or "I'm not fine" out loud in a professional setting. What chronic illness does to mental health that never gets billed as a separate diagnosis.
Neurodiversity and chronic illness at work
What organisations get wrong about accommodation — treating it as a cost to be minimised rather than the condition under which some of their best people can actually do the work.
Recognition
Ashoka Changemaker
INITIAL Sonderstipendium — German Academy of Arts
Sustainability Entrepreneurship Award
MCI Creativity Award
For press, partnership, or advocacy inquiries
talks@roishternin.com