Sylvie Leotin
Blind Spots in Complex Human Systems
Sylvie Leotin came to healthcare as a cancer patient, and her survivorship led her to a role she never expected: Principal Investigator of seven-figure research funding. She set out to understand why care that met rigorous medical standards repeatedly left her exposed to risks the system did not see—and to change how healthcare, and now AI, sees the people it serves.
A Different Way of Seeing
The journey that prepared her to pursue that question was equally unusual. Trained professionally in ballet at France’s National Conservatory, she learned to sense how a system behaves from within—through the direct experience of her body. As an early researcher at the Stanford Robotics Laboratory, she absorbed a principle that stayed with her throughout her career: a machine can only act on what it can perceive. A Stanford master’s in Engineering-Economic Systems gave her the tools to analyze the human consequences of complex systems. She then spent several decades in technology innovation, working at global technology giants and early-stage companies before founding her own innovation practice, where she pioneered an immersive method for revealing the blind spots between what customers experience and what the companies building for them see.
Experience to Evidence
She founded Equify Health to turn patients’ lived experience into evidence for redesigning health systems. Partnering with Emory University School of Medicine, she secured a $750,000 Genentech grant to investigate blind spots in patient care, then translated the findings into an immersive workshop that helped clinicians discover risks they had not previously recognized. Its success led to a second $1 million Genentech grant, bringing total funding to $1.75 million.
Her research ultimately uncovered the underlying structural cause of these blind spots and laid the foundation for a new conceptual framework for understanding safety and equity in healthcare. Today, her work brings together medicine, humanism, ethics, systems design, and AI to reveal hidden risks before they are built into the future of care.
“Sylvie Leotin is a wise woman and a visionary regarding the ills of our healthcare system and how to fix it. If we are ever to improve the care of cancer patients, it will be by listening to voices such as hers.”
— George Sledge, MD, former President, American Society of Clinical Oncology
A Platform for Change
Sylvie is Affiliate Faculty at Belmont University College of Medicine and a Fellow of the Belmont Collaborative for Health Systems Innovation. These roles connect her work with health system leaders and medical educators who shape how care is designed and taught. Beyond academia, she advises an AI-powered digital health startup, bringing her perspective into the development of emerging healthcare technologies.
Sylvie has delivered keynotes and Grand Rounds for the National Cancer Institute, Stanford Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and national professional medical associations. She has published in the Journal of Patient Experience and STAT and has been featured in The Boston Globe and on the ASCO podcast.
Work with Sylvie
Sylvie Leotin welcomes invitations to speak, teach, advise, and collaborate on healthcare innovation, patient safety, trust, and the ethics of AI. She brings a distinctive vantage point to the blind spots of complex human systems and what they mean for the people who depend on them. Get in touch to explore what we can accomplish together.
Past Engagements
