Scholar | Entrepreneur | Speaker
Blind Spots in Human Systems
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 care for future patients.
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 experiential method for uncovering unmet needs.
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 and laid the foundation for a new conceptual framework for understanding safety and equity in healthcare, with implications for AI. Today, her work brings together medicine, humanism, ethics, systems design, and technology to challenge what systems call success.
“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 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 in the care it delivers. 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 medical associations. She has served on the Editorial Leadership Board of the Journal of Patient Experience and has been featured in The Boston Globe.
Selected Engagements
Work with Sylvie
Sylvie Leotin welcomes invitations to speak, teach, advise, and collaborate across medicine, health systems, technology, AI, ethics, and design. She brings an original perspective to questions of innovation, institutional blind spots, and the human consequences of complex systems. Get in touch to explore what we can accomplish together.