Nneka Sederstrom
- AI Governance & Ethical Innovation: Helping healthcare leaders navigate emerging technology with trust, accountability, and human-centered decision-making.
- Health Equity & Systems Transformation: Turning equity strategy into sustainable organizational change and better outcomes.
- Ethics-Centered Leadership: Equipping leaders to make complex decisions with empathy, courage, and ethical clarity.
Nneka Sederstrom Speaker Biography
Dr. Nneka Sederstrom is a nationally recognized clinical ethicist, healthcare executive, and AI governance leader with more than 25 years of experience at the intersection of ethics, health equity, and systems transformation. She brings a rare combination of bedside clinical expertise, C-suite executive leadership, and emerging technology governance to every engagement.
Dr. Sederstrom served as the inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer at Hennepin Healthcare, Minnesota’s largest safety-net health system, where she led enterprise equity strategy across a 7,000-person organization and oversaw a 150-person team. Prior to that role, she directed clinical ethics programs at MedStar Washington Hospital Center and Children’s Minnesota for a combined 20 years, building two of the country’s most recognized ethics consultation programs and establishing the first clinical ethics fellowship in the Twin Cities.
Her work spans clinical ethics consultation, AI governance framework development, health equity strategy, advance care planning infrastructure, and organizational culture transformation. She holds two pending patents in digital health and is completing a certificate in AI in Healthcare from Harvard Medical School. She is the author of Designed to Heal: Why Healthcare Isn’t Working and How to Finally Get It Right, a nationally recognized speaker, and the creator of the E.M.P.A.T.H.Y. framework for ethics-centered organizational leadership.
Dr. Sederstrom has presented at Harvard, Yale, Mayo Clinic, Vanderbilt, and the National Academies. She holds a PhD, MPH, and MA, and is a Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians (FCCP) and the American College of Critical Care Medicine (FCCM). She is a member of the Hastings Center Report Steering Committee on Anti-Black Racism in Bioethics and a former board member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
She is available for consulting, advisory, facilitation, and fractional executive engagements in clinical ethics, AI governance, health equity strategy, and organizational transformation.
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Speech Topics
Designed to Heal: Why Healthcare Isn’t Working and How to Finally Get It Right
Healthcare is not failing because people do not care. It is failing because the system was never designed to heal in the way we now need it to.
Hospitals are closing. Systems are consolidating. Clinicians are burning out. Communities are losing trust. And leaders are celebrating dashboard wins while quietly knowing something still is not working. In this powerful, timely, and deeply human keynote, Dr. Nneka Sederstrom names what most healthcare leaders feel but struggle to say out loud, and gives them a framework for finally doing something about it.
Drawing on more than two decades at the intersection of bedside clinical ethics, public health, and executive leadership, Dr. Sederstrom reframes today’s healthcare crisis not as a failure of effort or intention, but as a failure of design. Using her original E.M.P.A.T.H.Y. framework, she guides audiences from the language of performance to the architecture of healing, showing leaders how to stop managing symptoms and start redesigning systems.
Direct. Funny. Fierce. And deeply grounded in the real, Dr. Sederstrom delivers not just inspiration, but infrastructure.
Audiences will leave with:
• A new language for naming what is not working; beyond burnout and budget
• The E.M.P.A.T.H.Y. framework as a practical leadership tool
• Clarity on the difference between performative progress and meaningful transformation
• An understanding of empathy not as a soft skill, but as a structural force
• Actionable first steps they can implement immediately
Ideal for: Healthcare executives and senior leaders, hospital and health system boards, clinical and nursing leadership, patient experience and quality teams, academic medical centers, professional healthcare associations, and public health organizations.
Available as: Keynote (45–90 min) · Half-Day Leadership Intensive · Full-Day Workshop · Board & Executive Retreat · Conference Plenary
Dr. Sederstrom is the author of Designed to Heal: The Field Guide (2026); her companion book, Designed to Heal: Why Healthcare Isn’t Working — and How to Finally Get It Right, is forthcoming.
The Ethics of AI in Healthcare: Governing What We Build Before It Governs Us
Health systems are deploying AI faster than they are governing it. In this keynote, Dr. Nneka Sederstrom — clinical ethicist and AI governance leader — gives leaders a practical way to govern emerging technology with trust and accountability. She covers the three questions every health system should answer before buying an AI tool, who carries moral responsibility when a model is wrong, and why governance without an ethicist at the table is compliance theater.
Audiences will leave with: a working AI governance framework; the three pre-procurement questions; language for keeping accountability with people, not systems.
Ideal for: health system executives and boards, digital health leaders, clinical informatics teams, healthcare AI conferences.
From Equity Statements to Equity Systems
Most health systems have an equity statement. Few have an equity system. Drawing on her experience as the inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer at Hennepin Healthcare, Dr. Sederstrom shows leaders how to turn equity strategy into sustainable organizational change — and how to tell the difference between performative progress and transformation.
Audiences will leave with: how to diagnose the gap between what the organization says and what it built; structures that make equity survive leadership turnover; first steps for the next 90 days.
Ideal for: healthcare executives, boards, public health leaders, health equity conferences.
