Knowliah helps MSF to document lessons learned from the Ebola crisis

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) continues to play a lead role in managing the Ebola crisis in west Africa.  A critical Ebola review was launched in order to detect and capture valuable knowledge from over a million e-mails and documents created by hundreds of staff during the last year, in order to update internal guidelines, increase effectiveness in decision making and reduce risk in future outbreaks.

MSF has chosen Knowliah’s technology to facilitate and fuel its critical Ebola review. 

The Knowliah platform allows an important reduction in elapsed time and human effort to detect and capture valuable knowledge.  This is realized with the advanced Knowliah Information Intelligence engines based on the unique combination of auto-classification, text-cluster and text-mining techniques making unstructured information and communication accessible and valuable.

issues – challenges

 In order to learn, one should:

(a) define a structure to organize documents and e-mails,

(b) analyse the information from different perspectives (operational, medical, finance, logistics, …),

(c) prepare answers to key-questions, and

(d) understand and document specific decisions.

Taking into account the huge volume: manually classifying, studying, understanding, … is not an option due to the time this would take.

David Curtis, Project Manager for the Ebola Review at MSF, says:
“The solution put forward by Knowliah provides a fast, intelligent and efficient way to discover valuable insights from the thousands of documents and e-mails collected during the Ebola crisis. We needed a user-friendly system that was able to automatically organize large volumes of information in a consistent way, some of it hidden within zipped files attached to emails, and detect patterns through text analytics. We will now quickly learn from the past, in order to optimize our processes and decisions in any future projects.”

solution with Knowliah

Knowliah’s tools result in following main advantages and business value for MSF:

• The elapsed time of the MSF Ebola Review will be shorter and results will be available much sooner (compared to a manual process)
• The MSF Ebola Review team will use their research time more efficiently
• The quality of the MSF Ebola Review should improve as the reviewers have a more in-depth view of all related content, thanks to:
  • increased access to information, making it findable
  • increase usage of existing information
  • discovering links between information and communication

Hans Van Heghe, Managing Director of Knowliah, says:
“We are pleased we can assist MSF in its humanitarian work. We have to learn and create new knowledge from each crisis in order to better prevent and address potential upcoming humanitarian crisis of any kind. It is about re-use, finding patterns, learn and becoming aware. This has become the only way to maximize the valorization of your information and know-how assets.”

Knowliah’s technology has been recognized by Gartner, an international ICT rating consulting organisation, (02/2014) as one of the 24 mentioned “Vendors to watch” in the category Analytics – Content Analytics, Media Content, Text Mining.
Gartner itself describes this category as follows: “These vendors provide specialist offerings and tools that extract dimensions of meaning from targeted content. Examples include fact and entity extraction, sentiment analysis, categorization and clustering.”