Martijn Schuemie, PhD, took the stage at the 2019 OHDSI U.S. Symposium and laid out a collection of internet locations where potential collaborators could learn about the tools and best practices developed within the community. To an audience that included about 200 first-time attendees, it must have been a daunting moment.
That feeling wouldn’t last long, as Schuemie followed by reaching under a white cover and pulling out the first version of the Book of OHDSI, the product of a year-long collaborative effort within the community to provide the best documentation for all aspects of OHDSI. Twenty chapters within five sections (the OHDSI Community, Uniform Data Representation, Data Analytics, Evidence Quality, and OHDSI Studies) were written to empower any new researcher with the ability to generate real-world evidence to improve the healthcare community.
Then Schuemie had his Oprah moment. You get the Book of OHDSI … you get the Book of OHDSI … you get the Book of OHDSI. Ultimately, every attendee at the 2019 OHDSI U.S. Symposium walked away with a free Book of OHDSI, and few of them waited long to get their hands on it.
For those who didn’t attend the Symposium, the Book of OHDSI is available here as HTML, as well as EPUB and PDF (click the small download icon at the top). Anybody who wants an actual copy of the book can order it through Amazon at cost price.
“OHDSI is a brilliant open-science effort that has established a collaboration among more than 150 large organizations. Collectively these organizations carry healthcare data for a staggering half billion lives,” said Clem McDonald, MD, Emeritus Indiana Distinguished Professor of Medicine. “OHDSI’s pièce de résistance is its design of an open data model that specifies strict coding, privacy and security standards that all collaborators have agreed to adopt. The work enables the unification of data from multiple sources to provide the data mass, reproducibility testing and statistical power required by analytics, especially those powered by AI methods.
“The OHDSI effort has already produced novel approaches to large-scale data analyses and answered important clinical questions,” McDonald said. “However, it is just beginning, and much more remains to be done. The Book of OHDSI will enable other organizations to add to the analytic ferment, and to the data mass, needed to answer pressing analytic and clinical questions.”
