Scholar | Entrepreneur | Speaker

Examining Blind Spots in Human Systems

unexpected Path

Sylvie Leotin came to healthcare as a cancer patient, and her survivorship took her somewhere she never expected: Principal Investigator in academic medicine. She wanted to understand why care that met rigorous medical standards repeatedly left her exposed to risks the system did not see—and to turn that understanding into safer systems of care.

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. As an early researcher at the Stanford Robotics Laboratory, she absorbed a principle that would stay with her: a machine can act only 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 two decades in technology innovation, translating unmet needs into products.

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 cancer care, then translated the findings into an immersive workshop that helped clinicians perceive 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 causes and laid the foundation for a broader framework with implications for healthcare safety, equity, and AI.

Today, her work brings together medicine, humanism, ethics, systems design, and technology to challenge what systems call success.

A platform for change

Sylvie Leotin is Affiliate Faculty at Belmont University's College of Medicine and a Fellow of the Belmont Collaborative for Health Systems Innovation. Bridging the analytical rigor of systems engineering with an embodied understanding of human experience, she reveals what healthcare overlooks at the interface of institutional systems and lived reality. Her Belmont affiliation connects her scholarship with a global community of healthcare leaders advancing health systems innovation and medical education.

She has delivered keynotes and Grand Rounds for the National Cancer Institute, Stanford Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and national professional organizations. She has published in the Journal of Patient Experience and STAT and has been featured in The Boston Globe.

Speaking & Teaching

Henry Ford Health logo with blue and dark blue text on a white background.
Emory University School of Medicine logo with a shield and crossed medical instruments
Stanford Medicine logo with shield containing a fern, caduceus staff, and interconnected squares.
Logo of HCSC Health Care Service Corporation with blue medical icons.
Logo of the American Society of Transplantation with the abbreviation 'AST' in blue and the full name in blue and green text.
NIH logo next to text that reads 'National Cancer Institute' in maroon letters
Logo for the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization with a purple floral design and the acronym NHPCO.
Merck logo with a stylized teal cross symbol and black text.
ASCO logo in blue text on a white background.
Yale University School of Medicine logo with shield, red and white stripes, and gold medical staff symbol

Invite Sylvie

Sylvie Leotin welcomes invitations to speak, teach, advise, and collaborate across medicine, health systems, technology, and design. She brings a distinctive systems perspective shaped by decades in technology and human-centered innovation and five years of Genentech-funded healthcare research. If that perspective would be useful to your organization or audience, please get in touch.