The work

Brought in for one thing. Found the bigger picture. Built it.

Eleven pieces of work, told the same way each time: what I was brought in for, what I found, what I built, and what happened. In health and out of it. Seven of them are on the home page in short form.

In health2019 to 2026

WA Data Linkage

2020–26 · WA Health

Australia's oldest linkage system, and a research community that needed it to move faster.

Brought in for: A directorate in the middle of a reform. An expert review chaired by the Chief Scientist had recommended change. The backlog ran years deep in places. Ministerials kept arriving asking why a research project took as long as it did and cost what it cost. Other agencies were ready to take the work off us. And a pandemic on the way.
Found: A world-pioneering system, with data back to 1945. The capability was never the problem. Linkage ran on a monthly cycle, and for some projects a yearly one, delivered by manual extract. Governance treated as friction. Researchers waiting longer than anyone wanted, and a unit that knew it.
Built: With the linkage team: the WA Data Linkage Strategy 2022 to 2024, endorsed by the Minister, then 2025 to 2030. The system moved to the cloud. Linkage hourly instead of monthly through COVID, when WA was the only jurisdiction with linked data good enough to run operations on. The distributed linkage model behind PeopleWA, whole of government, when the accepted view was that distributed linkage and delivery could not work. Request forms with governance and ethics designed in, not bolted on. And the linked data behind the state's annual funding submission to the Commonwealth.
Result: "Commending the Department is not something I'm known for in the linkage space. Certainly has been a turnaround, and the community have noticed." Prof David Preen, UWA.

Back to the grid

REDCap, statewide

2019–26 · WA Health

Clinicians on paper, in Excel and in workarounds. Hours spent on data entry when they should have been at the bedside.

Brought in for: There was no brief. Clinicians who needed to collect data safely, and a development budget that would never stretch to them.
Found: Sitting beside clinicians at Fiona Stanley, the need was simple, secure data capture aligned with policy, not more ICT blockers. Through the clinical and university network I found REDCap: built at Vanderbilt, used by millions of researchers, free under consortium, able to run inside the WA Health network so the data never left the state, open source underneath, which I'd been building in for twenty years. Nobody had treated it as infrastructure.
Built: I fought the first instance in at Fiona Stanley as a research officer and built Patient Blood Management on it myself. Then the pandemic arrived and I took it into the enterprise: one statewide REDCap, hardened for security, resilience and load, with guides, governance, training and integration into WebPAS and the DMR. Then I got out of the way.
Result: Statewide Telestroke. WA Virtual Emergency Department, Virtual Immunology. The Voluntary Assisted Dying Navigator Service. Cancer MDT. Hundreds more, built by clinicians to suit their workflows and patients, not bought from a vendor.

Back to the grid

COVID Care at Home and the RAT Register

2022 · WA Health

The borders were opening in February, and nothing on the table would be ready.

Brought in for: A statewide online registration form for COVID Care at Home, with the WA border reopening in February 2022.
Found: Every tool on the table would take longer than we had. The answer was the platform already inside the network. I got HSS ICT and the COVID leads to agree on REDCap over the alternatives, and to harden it for what was coming.
Built: Built on infrastructure that was already there and already hardened. A team of twelve. Live on 5 February 2022, twenty business days from the brief. Three weeks later the mandatory RAT Register folded into the same form. Dashboards on top, with COVID infections linked to vaccinations by our own team in near real time, for internal and public reporting.
Result: Over a million records. More than 40% of Western Australians used it. Twelve thousand registrations in a single day at the peak. Never went down. IPAA WA IT Practitioner of the Year, 2023.

Back to the grid

Linked Data Warehouse

2019–26 · WA Health

Tens of millions of rows, and no warehouse, no data management and no quality discipline underneath them.

Brought in for: Building the data warehouse.
Found: A health service that had never managed data at that scale, and had never had to. The datasets all existed. Nothing had ever brought them together in one place, so any question that crossed two of them was a project rather than a query.
Built: The WA Health Enterprise Linked Data Warehouse. The COVID-19 Vaccination Linked Data Repository, joining the immunisation register, pathology and hospital data. A secure research environment trialled with UNSW. Synthetic data with the Digital Health CRC. A 90-person function to run it all.
Result: Vaccine effectiveness, adverse events and contact tracing answered while they still mattered. Data turned into information: linked, analysed, and ready for AI.

Back to the grid

Platform governance

2024–25 · WA Health

The model was right. That turned out to be the easy part.

Brought in for: The governance model for a new enterprise health data platform.
Found: Everyone was treating it as a technology project. The real questions were who would own the decisions, who grants access and who says no, and nobody had asked them.
Built: An operating model built to liberate data, not ration it. A federated data council instead of a central gate. Small teams building governed data products together, in the open, with urgency, so trust in the product layer replaces the queue for raw extracts.
Result: Endorsed in principle. Not adopted in full: it was more change than the people who'd have to run it wanted. The lesson goes into every engagement since. A model is only as strong as the owner who wants it, so who owns it is now the first question I ask, not the last.

Back to the grid

Before health2000 to 2017

Business Objects

2000–05 · Enterprise software

Nobody asked me for anything. I overheard a phone call.

Brought in for: An Asia Pacific website, built to head office's style sheets.
Found: Every training booking in the region was being taken over the phone, one course at a time. It had never been called a problem, because it had always been the job.
Built: A booking form that took multiple courses and quantities in a single submission, so one office manager could enrol a whole organisation at once.
Result: The first client Jahan ever had, and a five-year one. It ended when SAP bought them, not when the work ran out.

Back to the grid

Big Day Out

2004 · Music festival

A ticketing company at war with its own customers.

Brought in for: A ticket website that kept crashing.
Found: A record-store ticket seller going online for the first time, and a scalping war with eBay it couldn't win by fighting.
Built: Online ticketing with tracked physical delivery. A face-value resale marketplace with verified tickets. A ballot that turned sold-out shows into second shows.
Result: Tickets that arrived. Scalpers with nothing to sell. Sold-out shows that became two.

Back to the grid

Shock Records

2004 · Independent music

The country's largest independent label, sitting on its most valuable asset without knowing it.

Brought in for: A small online wholesale store.
Found: Australia's largest independent record label, with a catalogue to match. The product catalogue, images and track listings were the most valuable thing they owned, and the data foundation to use them didn't exist.
Built: The catalogue as an asset. Then white-label artist stores with drop-ship fulfilment, invoicing and accounting on top of it.
Result: A record wholesaler selling online about ten years before the market caught up. I also pitched them digital and DRM free, to meet Apple rather than wait for it. They didn't take that one, and digital didn't wait. The company didn't survive the shift. Being right isn't the job. Getting it adopted is.

Back to the grid

Splash City

2015–17 · My own venture

A regulated operation that had to open anywhere, pass every inspection, then pack up and leave.

Brought in for: Nothing. My own money, and a bet that it could be done at all.
Found: Nobody had built a fully transportable water park. The problem was licensing, safety and logistics, not slides.
Built: The world's first, with the Guinness World Record tallest inflatable waterslide, and a consulting practice advising governments and operators on design and operations.
Result: It ran. It passed. Then it moved, and ran again.

Back to the grid

How I build now2026 · Two gaps nobody was fixing

Talli

www.talli.au 2026 · My own build

Financial records are as revealing as clinical ones. Nothing on the market treated them that way.

Brought in for: Nothing. Nobody briefs you on a gap.
Found: Two gaps. People appointed to manage a relative's money must account for every dollar to the Public Trustee each year, and do it with a spreadsheet and a shoebox. And AI finance tools want all of your data, secured like a to-do app.
Built: An AI personal finance product built on the model Apple calls Advanced Data Protection: end-to-end encrypted, so your records are unreadable by us. Talli Guardian, for private administrators reporting to the Public Trustee, is next.
Result: In beta, built solo with agents in months. Building was the quick part. Seeing the gap was the work.

Back to the grid

ScriptTracker

www.scripttracker.au 2026 · My own build

The missing layer under the Australian eScript system: what a person actually has, and when it runs out.

Brought in for: Nothing. I wanted it to exist.
Found: People on five or more medicines run a small logistics operation every week: repeats, owing scripts, the pill box, the GP visit timed to the last repeat. Every pharmacy app is built to sell a refill. None is built around that workflow.
Built: The patient's own record of what they have, what's owing and what to ask the GP for, plus the weekly box fill. Made for the Australian eScript system. Private by design.
Result: Shipped, and in use every week. Same method as the client work: watch the workflow before designing anything.

Back to the grid

Bring me the brief. We'll work out what it's really asking for.

nasir@jahan-interactive.com.au

Jahan · For research teams · For WA Government · Insights