U.S. Air Force Medical Service 


The Organisation:

The Air Force Medical Service has a budget of $6.9 billion and runs 75 hospitals and clinics providing care to over 2.6 million beneficiaries. 

The Challenge:

Transforming raw information into actionable knowledge requires information awareness. Information retrieval can occur via a search engine or browsing a virtual file folder for its content; both processes involve the use of metadata, a.k.a. data about data.

The Solution:

The AFMS decided to move forward with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) compliant web services solution known as Concept Searching. 

"Within the Air Force Medical Service (AFMS), the beginning of the Information Management Lifecycle often starts with the creation of a Microsoft Office document that gets saved into various document management systems and file servers.

Incorporating Concept Searching's compound term processing engine capability into AFMS Knowledge Management operations has increased exposure of enterprise content and the precision by which that information is retrieved.

In addition to eliminating the cost associated with the manual tagging and filing of information assets, Concept Searching's Taxonomy Manager provides our Subject Matter Experts with a user friendly web interface enabling the development of controlled vocabularies that can be used to filter search results and auto-classify content to folder structures."

Lt Col James D. Whitlock, USAF, MSC 
Chief, Decision Support Branch 
Air Force Medical Service