Same job, different rooms.

Health, from the bottom

In 2018 I walked into Fiona Stanley Hospital as a volunteer, enrolling patients in clinical studies to learn how research actually runs. I wheeled patients down corridors and stood in theatre. I saw the hospital as an outsider with nothing to do but pay attention: where the pressure lands, what the system asks of the people on the floor, and how far the data is from what actually happens at the bedside. It is still the first thing I test any design against.

That became a research officer role, close enough to the technical problems to start solving them. I joined WA Health in September 2019 to do one thing: scope REDCap for the data directorate. By March 2020 I was holding linkage, engineering and innovation at once, three roles between one pair of hands, and the pandemic had arrived. In October 2020 they made me Director of Data and Information Systems.

The directorate's job was turning the state's data into information: governance, linkage, analytics and BI, engineering, digital systems and sovereign AI. Ninety people by 2025. Together we built the state's enterprise linked data warehouse, the COVID-19 data infrastructure, statewide REDCap, the 2025 to 2030 Data Linkage Strategy, and the operating model for the state's enterprise health data platform.

For a year in 2023 I was also Director of Medical Research and Innovation, overseeing the $250 million Future Health Research and Innovation Fund and reporting to the Deputy Director General, the Minister and the Fund's board chair. So I have sat on the funding side of the table as well as the data side.

That is the thread. Since 2018 I have supported research from every side of it. Enrolling the patients. Building the database they are collected in. Linking the data. Running the platform it sits on. Overseeing the fund that decides which studies happen at all. Every step from the patient in front of you to the money that decides the study goes ahead.

Before health

None of that was a change of career. It was the same job in a different room. In 1993 I brought the Gravis Ultrasound into WA, the first wavetable sound card for the PC anyone here had seen. In 1998, at Acclaim Entertainment, I pushed for a live terminal into the stock system so I could answer a customer on the phone and key the order in myself. It annoyed the people whose job that was. My first lesson in change management.

In 2000 I started Jahan. Business Objects was the first client, and a five-year one: brought in for a website, stayed because I overheard a phone call and built the booking system nobody had asked for. Big Day Out, Shock Records and Future Ticketing followed. At Shock I pitched DRM-free digital to meet Apple rather than wait for it. They didn't take it, and digital didn't wait.

Being right isn't the job. Getting it adopted is.

Then Splash City, the world's first fully transportable water park, with the Guinness World Record tallest inflatable waterslide. My own money, and a bet that a regulated operation could open anywhere, pass every inspection, then pack up and leave. It ran. It passed. Then it moved, and ran again.

In between I spent two years with Kimberley communities on a plan to revive Stompem Ground, the Broome Indigenous music festival, before gas hub politics closed the door. It's where I learnt that permission is the design, not the paperwork, and it changed how I approach anything that touches Aboriginal data.

Now

In 2025 Corinium named me in its Global Top 100 Innovators in Data, Analytics and AI. In October 2026 I left government and relaunched Jahan, which I had wound down in 2019 when I joined WA Health. It is one person. That used to be something I was quiet about. Now it's the point: one conversation, one decision, and nothing lost between them.

I still build things myself. Talli, an end-to-end encrypted AI personal finance product, and ScriptTracker, the missing layer under the Australian eScript system. Both built solo with agents in months.

Building was the quick part. Seeing the gap was the work.

Perth, Western Australia · LinkedIn · The work, in full