Canberra-based health technology firm Faz Australia has secured a pilot contract with ACT Health for its artificial intelligence medical scribe platform MedTalk, in what marks a significant milestone for the Pakistani-origin co-founders who built the product from a personal favour to a friend into a solution now being trialled inside Australia’s public health system. The artificial intelligence-driven documentation platform will be trialled by clinicians across the territory’s public health system, rolling out to approximately 60 clinicians in the initial phase, featuring deep integration with ACT Health’s Epic-based Digital Health Record.
The company behind the platform, Faz Australia, was co-founded by Atif Nisar and Maria Iftikhar — a husband-and-wife team whose backgrounds span enterprise digital delivery and frontline medicine. Nisar, previously the digital delivery lead for the Australian Government’s COVIDSafe app, and Iftikhar, a practising medical doctor, built MedTalk initially for a friend Dr Kalam, a general cardiologist at Heart of Canberra who needed a tool to reduce the burden of writing long specialist medical letters. What started as a targeted solution for one clinician grew into a product now entering a formal government pilot.
The pilot marks a significant milestone for Faz Australia, established in 2016. While MedTalk AI Scribe officially launched last year, it leverages a decade of the parent company’s expertise in enterprise information technology and healthcare systems. MedTalk has also recently solidified its status as an official Epic Vendor Partner. Epic is among the most widely deployed clinical information systems in the world, and official vendor partnership status typically signals a level of technical rigour and interoperability that health systems require before broader adoption.
The integration architecture matters as much as the product itself. The first phase focuses on high-level integration using HL7 standards, ensuring the scribe capability is natively embedded into existing clinical workflows rather than sitting as a standalone tool. HL7, or Health Level Seven, is the international standard for exchanging electronic health information, and embedding MedTalk directly within existing clinical systems removes the friction that has historically caused adoption to stall with standalone artificial intelligence tools.
Nisar framed the contract not simply as a technology trial but as a test of a rethought clinical process. “By leveraging Faz Australia’s established infrastructure, we are able to provide ACT Health with a solution that is both innovative and architecturally sound. This isn’t just a trial of a tool; it’s a trial of a refined clinical workflow,” he said.The company confirmed the pilot would span multiple hospital-based specialties, moving beyond general practice to test the platform’s versatility in high-pressure acute environments. This is a deliberate strategic choice: proving value across specialties, rather than in a single controlled context, significantly strengthens the case for territory-wide scaling.
The MedTalk team has conducted extensive trials in more than 15 regions including Canberra, New South Wales, Europe, the United States, and the Asia Pacific, testing across more than 20 different specialties and with more than 200 registered doctors. The platform is positioned at a price point the founders describe as at least 50 percent cheaper than major alternative providers, a deliberate decision given the cost pressures that health systems face when evaluating new technology at scale. For Pakistan’s diaspora community, the story of MedTalk carries particular resonance. Atif Nisar and Maria Iftikhar represent a cohort of Pakistani-origin professionals who have built institutional-grade technology in Australia, earning government contracts through technical merit and a decade of foundational enterprise work not startup hype. The ACT Health pilot is the kind of validation that, if successful, typically precedes territory-wide deployment and positions a company for engagements with larger state health systems across Australia.
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