Médecins Sans Frontières

Global humanitarian medical organisation. Provides vital research management and impact tools to researchers.

Achieved since launching the ReMIT platform

260+
active users
430+
created studies
68+
publications produced

Sharing life-saving research

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an independent humanitarian medical movement working in over 70 countries all over the world. Since 1971, they have provided emergency medical aid to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from healthcare. They don’t take sides in armed conflict and provide assistance regardless of race, religion or political affiliation.

MSF is a highly dispersed organisation, working across many disease topics and areas. Research is part of their daily business. Until recently, their research portfolio was managed through an intranet spreadsheet that contributors were only able to access intermittently.

They realised they needed an easily accessible platform for tracking research so it could be understood and disseminated widely – and have a greater impact. Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated software available was clunky and difficult to get researchers to buy into. It was time to build a custom solution.

Going from strength to strength

MSF teamed up with our existing client mySociety to create an MVP version of the Research Management and Impact Tool (ReMIT). ReMIT acts as a notebook for researchers and enables them to document the lifecycle of a study, from concept through to impact. It’s also open source and open access, enabling non-MSF staff to explore their research portfolio.

When it came to supporting MSF and applying continuous improvements to the ReMIT platform, mySociety were happy to recommend us as a trustworthy development studio. Our ongoing positive relationship with mySociety’s earned us the trust of a new client.

We now meet with the ReMIT team each month to discuss priorities and plan new features for their research management tool. We work in an iterative fashion to evaluate and refine ReMIT in order to release improvements for its users at the end of every month. We’re pleased to be supporting MSF to enhance the tools and services for their researchers all around the globe.

Technologies used: Heroku, Ruby on Rails, ElasticSearch