A clinician's perspective on a changing system.

Dr Tyson Welzel is the Founder and Managing Partner of Acuvera Consulting GmbH, a boutique consultancy focused on improving healthcare operations across the continuum of care. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 2001 and has spent more than two decades feeding an interest in every facet of emergency medicine — completing further qualifications in hyperbaric, diving, aviation and expedition medicine, as well as forensic medicine, medicine and the law, and disaster medicine.

For many years he served the dual function of clinician and Clinical Manager at a district hospital in Cape Town. Shifting to academia, he joined UCT's Division of Emergency Medicine as Assistant Professor and co-ordinator of the MPhil and PG Dip programmes, and served on the Human Research Ethics Committee of Stellenbosch University from 2011 to 2018. He is a co-founder of the Centre of Excellence in Emergency Medicine in Bern.

In 2016 he joined Mediclinic Group, taking responsibility for clinical governance and health technology assessments before being appointed to spearhead innovation across the organisation in 2019. He founded the Mediclinic radical innovation hub in Zug, Switzerland in 2021, and a secondary hub in Barcelona, Spain in 2023. His portfolio for the Group encompassed strategy, business development, innovation, research, data, automation and marketing. Dr Welzel moved on to establish Acuvera as Managing Partner in August 2025.

Dr Welzel's passion is planning for and assisting with system level change. Healthcare suffers from an incredible status quo bias. Even though we write the year 2026, many of the processes and procedures we use are many years old, not taking advantage of what could be done today. A fundamental rethink is required that is hindered by vested interests of multiple stakeholders on the one hand and a required confluence of medical knowhow, technological knowhow and funding expertise, while improving patient safety, quality of care and experience. While AI and embodied AI will play a major role going forward, healthcare fundamentally still requires empathy and a human touch, both threatened by an absolute lack of appropriately trained carers, nurses and doctors.