Médecins Sans Frontières Data Sharing Platform

About the client

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders is an independent global humanitarian organisation that provides emergency medical aid directly to people ‘affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters, and exclusion from healthcare… irrespective of race, religion, gender or political affiliation.’^[1] It is largely independently funded and operates in approximately 70 countries.

The organisation has a global federated structure comprising of 26 self-governed associations, each of which is affiliated with one of five MSF Operational Centres: Barcelona, Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam, and Brussels, which align activities and messaging.

Objectives of the Data Sharing Platform

Streamlining and improving the sharing of research data collected by the organisation’s staff, including its field practitioners, both internally and with external third parties, has been a long-held wish on the part of MSF. After an initial exploration of the MSF’s internal data sharing capacity, the offices in the Netherlands and Japan jointly decided to develop a data sharing platform (DSP). They hired Link Digital to do the job.

MSF were keen for a solution that provided a repository for research data and facilitated hands-off sharing, while avoiding duplication of effort or increased administrative workload for researchers. This meant tying the new platform to existing MSF systems.

Link Digital built the DSP based on the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN).  The developed DSP fetches the data from the existing MSF REMIT system using the REMIT Application Programming Interface (API). This allows the new DSP to incorporate research data while building in appropriate risk/access levels.

Partnership between Link Digital and Médecins Sans Frontières

While Link Digital has extensive experience in the application of CKAN for internal data catalogues, this was our first foray into the field of medical-related data. In addition, while MSF was seeking greater data sharing capacity, it had significant concerns related to data security and privacy, particularly around cloud security requirements for clinical data. To enable the sharing of this data while protecting people’s privacy, risk/access settings had to be added for each dataset, to determine which data are free to download or which require a request that would have to be submitted and approved.

Link Digital staff became part of a multi-disciplinary team that designed the new data platform. Our staff took part in a series of face-to-face meetings with MSF personnel to enable us to understand MSF’s data ambitions. We then provided advice on what could and could not be done within the existing CKAN structure and lent our expertise in designing and customising the DSP.

Other technical aspects of the project

The DSP allows MSF researchers to have access either as individuals or in a group, enabling them to collaborate on the publication of data assets. Working with MSF staff, Link Digital augmented a CKAN-based data sharing infrastructure with Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing platform.

The core CKAN components used in the installation were:

• Postgres, an advanced and fully scalable database management system that includes support for geospatial data.
• Apache Solr, a search platform that provides fast, scalable, and reliable search capabilities for websites and data repositories.
• Redis, an in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker.
• A web server known as Nginx.

In addition, the DSP installation included the following add on software components:

• Remit API integration to fetch the data from MSF’s existing system, including the raw files.
• A Single Mail Transfer Protocol, also called an outgoing mail server, to handle both incoming and outgoing mail.
• Using DataCite to enable Digital Object provision, to help uniquely identify various objects standardised by the International Organization for Standardization, and which are used to classify academic, professional and government information in outputs such as academic journal articles, research reports, data sets and government publications.
• The use of onetrust for the management of privacy and cookies.
• Microsoft Azure Active Directory for single sign on. This enables users to conveniently connect to and use cloud-based apps over the Internet.

Benefits of the new site

As part of MSF’s long-term objective to improve the provision of data to external parties,

in addition to improving data sharing internally within MSF, the DSP will be specifically available to people outside the organisation. The platform aims to make data on a wide range of topics, including disease, emergency relief, water and sanitation, conflict, vaccination, and maternal and child health, more accessible by providing the tools to streamline publishing, and assist in the finding, sharing and using of data. The DSP includes guidance for uploading and downloading material, as well as research templates and tools for data management.

In addition to the more efficient storage of data and a reduction in the administrative burden placed on MSF researchers, the new DSP aims to:

• Make data more easily available for secondary research purposes and increase its potential use in advocacy initiatives around health policy/action.
• Make data more available to researchers, academics and decision-makers in MSF target countries. MSF has a wealth of patient/population health data for these countries, which often lack the resources and structures to collect important health and related data by their own means.

Future plans

As of early 2024, when this case study was written, the new DSP is in a pilot phase and only contains research data from initiatives undertaken by MSF’s Amsterdam Operational Centre. The aim is to do a thorough evaluation of the platform post its pilot phase, to see what revisions must be made, after which point the other four Operational Centre’s will be encouraged to join the platform. The long term goal is for the DSP to become the centralised sharing facility for all MSF research data.

Link Digital remains on hand to help test the site and address bugs and will continue to provide advice and development based on its experience with internal data sharing platforms. “We hope that Link Digital will continue to provide advice and development based on its experience with other platforms,” said Johan Martens, manager of the joint project team that worked on the new platform. “The platform will most likely continue to evolve significantly in the coming years before it can find its final form. We need a reliable expert partner in this process.”

Do you have a data project that you need assistance with?

Link Digital is ready to start a dialogue with you and your team on your open data needs. Contact us and tell us about your project.

MSF does not endorse or promote specific services or products

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^[1] Médecins Sans Frontières. “About Us.” https://msf.org.au/about-us