Zweli Tunyiswa

Autodidact, Bayesian, Bunburyer, Polyglot.

Profile picture of Zweli Tunyiswa

I am a healthcare entrepreneur and data scientist based in Concord, North Carolina. I am the CEO and co-founder of Open Wound Research, where I bring modern statistical methodology and real-world evidence to chronic wound care.

Bayesian inference, real-world evidence, and careful thinking applied to wound-care data, post-acute care, and Medicare claims.

What I Do

My day job is wound care: I lead Open Wound Research after fifteen years across marketing, strategy, and operations in wound care and post-acute medicine, most recently as CMO and Executive Director of Strategy at Wound Healing Solutions. Before that I spent a decade in healthcare management across physical medicine and rehabilitation, pain medicine, and consulting. At OWR the work spans statistical methodology for clinical trials and real-world evidence, the data infrastructure that makes Medicare and CMS data usable at scale, quantitative market research, the geography of access to mobile wound care, software we build to support clinicians and researchers, and the writing and speaking that makes the methods legible to clinicians, payors, and policymakers.

Around that I keep a wider research portfolio:

  • The nursing home market — what MDS, citation, staffing, and OSCAR/CASPER data actually say about post-acute care, and the analytical mistakes people make reading it.
  • The post-acute market more broadly — mobile-delivery economics, provider-shortage geography, and the gap between coverage policy and lived access.
  • Bayesian methods for real-world data — how to do honest inference when the data are observational and messy.
  • South African history and political economy — quantitative approaches to the questions of land, labour, capital, and inheritance that shape the country I grew up in.

I also chair the Clinical Trial Standards and Reporting workstream at the Wound Care Collaborative Community, sit on the research board of the Association for the Advancement of Wound Care, serve as Treasurer of the Independent Wound Specialist Society, and am a board member of Chronic Wound Care Management and Research.

Selected Work

Recent publications — see ORCID 0009-0008-6100-0828 for the full list.

Recent writing

Recent talks

See Talks and Publications for the full lists.

Interests

  • Bayesian inference
  • Real-world evidence
  • Causal inference
  • Quantitative market research
  • Healthcare claims & administrative data
  • GIS and spatial analysis
  • Network theory
  • Clinical trial methodology
  • South African history & political economy
  • Data infrastructure
  • Open-source software

Education

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