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Dr. Nneka Sederstrom is a healthcare executive, clinical ethicist, public health strategist, and speaker who has spent more than twenty years making the bedside and the boardroom answer to each other. She has sat with families at the moment a decision lands on a real person, and she has sat in the executive meeting where that decision was made months earlier by people who never saw the room. Most of her work lives in the distance between those two places.

She is the creator of the Designed to Heal framework and the author of Designed to Heal: The Field Guide, a working guide for leaders published in 2026. The framework treats empathy as infrastructure: seven design specifications, remembered by the letters E.M.P.A.T.H.Y., that a system built to heal has to meet. The Field Guide scores an organization twice on each one, once on what it says matters and once on what it has actually built, and names the distance between those numbers the Performative Progress Gap. It comes with a free scoring portal, a ninety-day build plan, and a one-page version for the board. The companion book, Designed to Heal: Why Healthcare Isn't Working — and How to Finally Get It Right, is forthcoming.

As CEO of UzObi, Inc., she works at the intersection of patient voice, trust, AI, and care design, building tools that let health systems hear what patients are actually telling them. Her consulting and speaking focus on systems and culture transformation: not just what is broken, but why it keeps recurring, and how to redesign structures, workflows, and decision-making so the fix survives the person who championed it.

Her speaking style is direct and funny, and she says the hard thing in a way that moves a room toward building something rather than defending what exists. She has delivered national and international keynotes on clinical ethics, end-of-life care, health equity, patient trust, AI in healthcare, and organizational transformation, and has been honored as a Distinguished Educator, a Richard S. Irwin Master Lecturer, and a participant in the Northwestern Mutual Black Founder Accelerator. Her academic training spans philosophy, public health, and medical sociology, which is why she tends to ask what a system was designed to produce before asking why it isn't producing something else.