2021 OHDSI Community Calls

The OHDSI community came together one more time this year for a holiday-themed final call of 2021. We had a holiday movie guessing game based on an SQL statement run against the OMOP CDM. There was a collaborative singing performance of “Diagnostics Are Coming To Town.” The community recognized each other for gifts given in 2021, and then Peter Rijnbeek shared a fitting way to wrap up 2021!

Happy holidays to everybody who helped build the OHDSI community in 2021!

Updates  

• Congratulations to the EHDEN Academy team on creating Course #14: Building confidence in real-world data: data quality reporting. Clair Blacketer serves as a guest lecturer for this course. The EHDEN Academy is free and has had more than 1,800 registrants.

• Congratulations to the team of Martina Recalde, Elena Roel, Andrea Pistillo, Anthony Sena, Albert Prats-Uribe, Waheed-Ul-Rahman Ahmed, Heba Alghoul, Thamir Alshammari, Osaid Alser, Carlos Areia, Edward Burn, Paula Casajust, Dalia Dawoud, Scott DuVall, Thomas Falconer, Sergio Fernández-Bertolín, Asieh Golozar, Mengchun Gong, Lana Yin Hui Lai, Jennifer Lane, Kristine Lynch, Michael Matheny, Paras Mehta, Daniel Morales, Karthik Natarjan, Fredrik Nyberg, Jose Posada, Christian Reich, Peter Rijnbeek, Lisa Schilling, Karishma Shah, Nigam Shah, Vignesh Subbian, Lin Zhang, Hong Zhu, Patrick Ryan, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, Kristin Kostka and Talita Duarte-Salles, whose publication of Characteristics and outcomes of 627 044 COVID-19 patients living with and without obesity in the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom, originally published in July in the International Journal of Obesity, was the featured publication in the Journal of Endocrinology & Metabolism last week.

• Registration opened last week for the 2022 OHDSI European Symposium, which will be held March 11 on the Steam Ship Rotterdam in The Netherlands. There will be tutorials held on the Steam Ship Rotterdam on both March 12-13. You can register for the symposium here.

• This week’s APAC Community Call (Wednesday, 10 pm ET) will focus on two studies selected at the APAC Symposium for the community to work on in 2022: Real world safety of treatments for multiple sclerosis (Nicole Pratt); and Quality assessment of CDM databases across the OHDSI-AP network (Chungsoo Kim).

• The latest edition of The Journey Newsletter is now available. This edition includes a look at the latest EUMAEUS publication, the recent open-source governance workshop, the APAC Symposium, and much more. If you aren’t receiving the newsletter each month, you can subscribe here.

OPENINGS  

• The Bouvé College of Health Sciences and The Roux Institute at Northeastern University seek candidates for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions in the emerging area of health/healthcare data science. The successful candidate will have primary responsibility for working with the OHDSI Center at the Roux Institute, focusing on education, research and community support of the global Open Source OHDSI initiative. For more information, please reach out to Brianne Olivieri-Mui, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Sciences, at B.mui@northeastern.edu.

• The Botnar Research Centre, NDORMS, University of Oxford seeks two Postdoctoral Data Scientists to join a Pharmaco- and Device epidemiology research group led by Professor Daniel Prieto-Alhambra. Full details on this position, including all responsibilities, are available here. The deadline is Dec. 17, 2021.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as we highlight all the global research presented at the OHDSI Symposium. Here is a look at the research being shared this week on Twitter and LinkedIn; please check them out and share with your own networks!

Monday: Pragmatic OMOP CDM
Tuesday: Assessing the impact of race on glomerular filtration rate prediction
Wednesday: Cohort Diagnostics
Thursday: Design criteria for reference sets in pharmacovigilance: The case of drug-drug interactions
Friday: How vocabulary updates can affect individual OMOP instances

Video Presentation

Where did OHDSI succeed in 2021? Where did we fall short? What progress did both the global community and individual workgroups make on their 2021 objectives and key results? Patrick Ryan delivered a wrap-up on OHDSI in 2021 during the Dec. 7 community call. Both the video and slides from his presentation are available below.

Please join us Dec. 14 for a fun, holiday-themed final call of the year!

Updates  

• Congratulations to the team of Ross Williams, Jenna Reps, the OHDSI/EHDEN Knee Arthroplasty Group, Peter Rijnbeek, Patrick Ryan and Daniel Prieto-Alhambra on the release of 90-Day all-cause mortality can be predicted following a total knee replacement: an international, network study to develop and validate a prediction model in Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy.

• Congratulations to Peter Rijnbeek, who was recently named Head of the Department of Medical Informatics at Erasmus MC.

• Registration opened last week for the 2022 OHDSI European Symposium, which will be held March 11 on the Steam Ship Rotterdam in The Netherlands. There will be tutorials held on the Steam Ship Rotterdam on both March 12-13. You can register for the symposium here.

• Last week’s APAC Community Call included two presentations: Characterization of non-communicable diseases, by Seng Chan You, and Comparison of mortality, morbidities & healthcare resources utilization between patients with and without a diagnosis of COVID-19, by Eric Wan. You can check out both presentations here.

• The latest edition of The Journey Newsletter is now available. This edition includes a look at the latest EUMAEUS publication, the recent open-source governance workshop, the APAC Symposium, and much more. If you aren’t receiving the newsletter each month, you can subscribe here.

OPENINGS

• The Bouvé College of Health Sciences and The Roux Institute at Northeastern University seek candidates for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions in the emerging area of health/healthcare data science. The successful candidate will have primary responsibility for working with the OHDSI Center at the Roux Institute, focusing on education, research and community support of the global Open Source OHDSI initiative. For more information, please reach out to Brianne Olivieri-Mui, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Sciences, at B.mui@northeastern.edu.

• The Botnar Research Centre, NDORMS, University of Oxford seeks two Postdoctoral Data Scientists to join a Pharmaco- and Device epidemiology research group led by Professor Daniel Prieto-Alhambra. Full details on this position, including all responsibilities, are available here. The deadline is Dec. 17, 2021.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as we highlight all the global research presented at the OHDSI Symposium. Here is a look at the research being shared this week on Twitter and LinkedIn; please check them out and share with your own networks!

Monday: Pragmatic OMOP CDM

Tuesday: Assessing the impact of race on glomerular filtration rate prediction

Wednesday: Cohort Diagnostics

Thursday: Characterization of Antiepileptic Drug Treatment Pathways with the Common Data Model: Pilot Results from Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Friday: How vocabulary updates can affect individual OMOP instances

Slides 

Year-In-Review | Community Updates

Video Presentation

The OHDSI 2021 Global Symposium Best Community Contribution Award recipients shared their honored research during the Nov. 30 community call. Each of the winning showcase submissions, as voted on by the community, and presenters can be found below:

• Extending the OMOP CDM to store the output of natural language processing pipelines (Alberto Labarga)
• The concept of anchoring in observational study design and its influence (Anna Ostropolets)
• Gold or Lead? Adjudicating Differences between CDM Data and Chart Reviews (Kimberley Dickinson)
• Competing risk regression models in cohort studies with the R package Cohort Method (Kelli Li)
• Detecting PTSD and self-harm among US Veterans using positive unlabeled Learning (Christophe Lambert)

Updates  

• Congratulations to the team of Xintong Li, Lana YH Lai, Anna Ostropolets, Faaizah Arshad, Eng Hooi Tan, Paula Casajust, Thamir M. Alshammari, Talita Duarte-Salles, Evan P. Minty, Carlos Areia, Nicole Pratt, Patrick B. Ryan, George Hripcsak, Marc A. Suchard, Martijn J. Schuemie and Daniel Prieto-Alhambra on the publication of “Bias, Precision and Timeliness of Historical (Background) Rate Comparison Methods for Vaccine Safety Monitoring: An Empirical Multi-Database Analysis” in Frontiers in Pharmacology. There was an OHDSI press release on this study, which you can read here.

• Congratulations to the team of Edward Burn, Sergio Fernández-Bertolín, Erica A Voss, Clair Blacketer, Maria Aragón, Martina Recalde, Elena Roel, Andrea Pistillo, Berta Raventós, Carlen Reyes, Sebastiaan van Sandijk, Lars Halvorsen, Peter R Rijnbeek, Talita Duarte-Salles for the study “Establishing and characterising large COVID-19 cohorts after mapping the Information System for Research in Primary Care in Catalonia to the OMOP Common Data Model,” which was recently posted on MedRxiv. Community feedback is welcomed.

• Registration has opened for the 2022 OHDSI European Symposium, which will be held March 11 on the Steam Ship Rotterdam in The Netherlands. There will be tutorials held on the Steam Ship Rotterdam on both March 12-13. You can register for the symposium here.

• The next edition of the CBER Best Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, Dec. 1, at 11 am. Heather Whitaker, a senior statistician at UK Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England), will provide a presentation on “Vaccine safety evaluation using the self-controlled case series method.” You can register for this talk now.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as we highlight all the global research presented at the OHDSI Symposium. Here is a look at the research being shared this week on Twitter and LinkedIn; please check them out and share with your own networks!

Monday: Bridging communities: Transforming MIMIC-IV to the OMOP CDM
Tuesday: Revealing unknown benefits of existing medications to aid the discovery of new treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder
Wednesday: Conversion of UK Biobank into the OMOP CDM: New Data for Inferences Between Episodic Care
Thursday: Criteria2Query 2.0: An Editable User Interface for Human-Machine Collaboration in Cohort Definition
Friday: Comparing the impact of alternative phenotype definitions: insights from developing cohorts for COVID-19 adverse events of special interest

Video Presentations

Extending the OMOP CDM to store the output of natural language processing pipelines (Alberto Labarga)

The concept of anchoring in observational study design and its influence (Anna Ostropolets)

Gold or Lead? Adjudicating Differences between CDM Data and Chart Reviews (Kimberley Dickinson)

Competing risk regression models in cohort studies with the R package Cohort Method (Kelli Li)

Detecting PTSD and self-harm among US Veterans using positive unlabeled Learning (Christophe Lambert)

Our community received a history lesson during the Nov. 23 OHDSI call. Leaders from the original Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Project joined for a discussion on that effort, the lessons they learned during that time, how it eventually transitioned to the OHDSI community, and how we have grown to where we are today. We were thrilled to welcome a trio of leaders from the original OMOP project: 

Marc Overhage • Chief Medical Informatics Officer, Anthem, Inc.
Judy Racoosin • Deputy Director for Safety, Division of Hepatology and Nutrition, FDA
Paul Stang • Vice-President: Global Epidemiology, Johnson & Johnson

Updates  

• Congratulations to the team of Kristine Lynch, Jillian Shipherd, Elise Gatsby, Benjamin Viernes, Scott DuVall, and John Blosnich on the publication of “Sexual orientation-related disparities in health conditions that elevate COVID-19 severity” in Annals of Epidemiology.

• Congratulations to Miguel Pedrera, Noelia Garcia, Paula Rubio, Juan Luis Cruz, José Luis Bernal, and Pablo Serrano on the publication of “Making EHRs Reusable: A Common Framework of Data Operations” in the recent “Studies in Health Technology and Informatics” newsletter.

• Congratulations to Ines Reinecke, Michéle Zoch, Markus Wilhelm, Martin Sedlmayr, and Franziska Bathelt on the publication of “Transfer of Clinical Drug Data to a Research Infrastructure on OMOP – A FAIR Concept” in the recent “Studies in Health Technology and Informatics” newsletter.

• Congratulations to Emanuele Girani, Matteo Gabetta, Anna Alloni, Morena Stuppia, Lucia Sacchi, and Nicola Barbarini on the publication of “Automatic Data Transfer from OMOP-CDM to REDCap: A Semantically-Enriched Framework” in the recent “Studies in Health Technology and Informatics” newsletter.

• Congratulations to Matteo Gabetta, Anna Alloni, Francesca Polce, Giordano Lanzola, Enea Parimbelli, and Nicola Barbarini on the publication of “Development of a FHIR Layer on Top of the OMOP Common Data Model for the CAPABLE Project” in the recent “Studies in Health Technology and Informatics” newsletter.

• Paul Nagy recently introduced an upcoming OHDSI Open-Source Governance Workshop, which will be held Nov. 29, 2021, between 9 am – 1 pm ET. A calendar invite was sent out last week; if you did not receive it, the workshop link is here. You can watch his brief presentation here and learn how all members of the community can benefit from joining this half-day workshop.

• The next edition of the CBER Best Seminar Series will be Wednesday, Dec. 1, at 11 am. Heather Whitaker, a senior statistician at UK Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England), will provide a presentation on “Vaccine safety evaluation using the self-controlled case series method.” You can register for this talk now.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium, held last week, was an engaging and informative day for both our Asia-Pacific and global communities. The morning session featured several talks, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. If you missed that session, or want to watch it again, it has been posted to the OHDSI APAC page.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as we highlight all the global research presented at the OHDSI Symposium. Here is a look at the research being shared this week on Twitter and LinkedIn; please check them out and share with your own networks!

Monday: Understanding Precision Medicine through the NIH All of Us Research Program and NCI Cancer Research Data Commons

Tuesday: From metrics to intelligence using the OMOP CDM and the Patient-Level-Prediction package as a foundation decision support tool

Wednesday: Predictive Performance of the Charlson Comorbidity Index: SNOMED CT Disease Hierarchy Versus International Classification of Diseases

Video Presentation: The History of OHDSI

The Nov. 16 community call highlighted six OHDSI network studies that are either ongoing or are close to starting. We heard about the exciting work happening within our global community, and what type of collaboration these study leads are seeking as they move forward. Presentations included:

• Asieh Golozar: Prognostic Significance of Liver Metastasis in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
• Leena Elhussein: Redefining Polypharmacy: A Longitudinal Study in Routinely Collected Data
• Noémie Elhadad: Health Equity Research Assessment (HERA) Characterization
• Jacob Zelko: Assessing Health Equity in Mental Healthcare Delivery Using a Federated Network Research Model
• Annika Jodicke and Kristin Kostka: Long COVID Phenotyping and Vaccine Effectiveness Methods
• Erica Voss: Adverse Events of Special Interest within COVID-19 Subjects

Updates  

• Congratulations to Yongseok Mun Seng Chan You, Da Yun Lee, Seok Kim, Yoo-Ri Chung, Kihwang Lee, Ji Hun Song, Young Gun Park, Young Hoon Park, Young-Jung Roh, Se Joon Woo, Kyu Hyung Park, Rae Woong Park, Sooyoung Yoo, Dong Jin Chang, Sang Jun Park for the publication of the study “Real-world incidence of endophthalmitis after intravitreal anti-VEGF injection: Common Data Model in ophthalmology” in the journal Epidemiology and Health over the weekend.

• Both Jamie Weaver and Kristin Kostka were quoted in a Sunday USA Today feature titled “Electronic medical records have been around decades. Their power to help other patients is starting to be unleashed.” Jamie Weaver’s personal story of using OHDSI tools following his melanoma diagnosis, which he shared at the OHDSI2021 Global Symposium, is included in this feature. (subscription required to read)

• Last week, Paul Nagy introduced an upcoming OHDSI Open-Source Governance Workshop, which will be held Nov. 29, 2021, between 9 am – 1 pm ET. You can watch his brief presentation here and learn how all members of the community can benefit from joining this half-day workshop.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held this Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). If you registered, you should have already received a calendar invite. More details have been posted to the OHDSI APAC page, and you can register for the symposium here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

Slides

Community Updates | Elhadad | Kostka/Jodicke | Voss

Videos

Asieh Golozar: Prognostic Significance of Liver Metastasis in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Leena Elhussein: Redefining Polypharmacy: A Longitudinal Study in Routinely Collected Data

Noémie Elhadad: Health Equity Research Assessment (HERA) Characterization

Jacob Zelko: Assessing Health Equity in Mental Healthcare Delivery Using a Federated Network Research Model

Annika Jodicke and Kristin Kostka: Long COVID Phenotyping and Vaccine Effectiveness Methods

https://youtu.be/FRmRg_304WU

Erica Voss: Adverse Events of Special Interest within COVID-19 Subjects

The Nov. 9 community call featured three demos to educate the community about tools to use for the adoption of our OHDSI data standards. Topics and presenters are available below:

• Introduction to CDM v5.4 (Clair Blacketer)
• OHDSI Vocabularies (Michael Kallfelz)
• ETL Inspection Report (Maxim Moinat)

Updates 

• Congratulations to Patricia Biedermann, Rose Ong, Alexander Davydov, Alexandra Orlova, Philip Solovyev, Hong Sun, Graham Wetherill, Monika Brand and Eva-Maria Didden for the publication of Standardizing registry data to the OMOP Common Data Model: experience from three pulmonary hypertension databases in BMC Medical Research Methodology.

• The Hyve recently published this FAIRplus recipe on how to make published observational research data more FAIR. The recipe describes the work done on making data on the website of the Covid-19 EHDEN/OHDSI studyathon, held in March 2020, more findable and interoperable.

• The latest Open Data Partner Call, hosted by EHDEN, will conclude next Monday, Nov. 15, at 17:00 CET. Following the four open calls to date, EHDEN currently has 98 data partners from 23 different countries which are mapping their data to the OMOP common data model. This includes several EHDEN project partners who have also mapped their data to the OMOP CDM for use in the federated network.

• Paul Nagy introduced the upcoming OHDSI Open-Source Governance Workshop, which will be held Monday, Nov. 29, from 9 am – 1 pm. He discussed its goals (watch the discussion here) and how many different roles of interest it would pertain to within the community. Look for a Teams meeting link coming in the near future.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). There are several planned talks during the full-day event, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. More details have been posted to the OHDSI APAC page, and you can register for the symposium here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

Slides

Community Updates

Videos

CDM v5.4 (Clair Blacketer)

Getting Vocabularies Into My OMOP CDM (Michael Kallfelz)

ETL Inspection Report (Maxim Moinat)

The Nov. 2 Community Call featured breakout discussions on future collaboration opportunities within OHDSI. As our global community starts to turn its attention towards 2022, we hope these breakout discussions will help shape different paths for OHDSI to make a positive impact in the future. Thank you to these community leaders for facilitating these discussions! Videos of all four breakouts are posted below.

Methods Research: Jenna Reps and Martijn Schuemie
Data Standards: Clair Blacketer and Maxim Moinat
Open-Source Development: Adam Black and Anthony Sena
Clinical Applications: Talita Duarte-Salles and Asieh Golozar

Updates 

• Congratulations to Antoine Lamer, Osama Abou-Arab, Alexandre Bourgeois, Adrien Parrot, Benjamin Popoff, Jean-Baptiste Beuscart, Benoît Tavernier, and Mouhamed Djahoum Moussa for the publication of Transforming Anesthesia Data Into the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model: Development and Usability Study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

• Congratulations to William Wood, Peter Marks, Robert Plovnick, Kathleen Hewitt, Donna Neuberg, Sam Walters, Brendan Dolan, Emily Tucker, Charles Abrams, Alexis Thompson, Kenneth Anderson, Paul Kluetz, Ann Farrell, Donna Rivera, Matthew Gertzog, and Gregory Pappas for the publication of ASH Research Collaborative: A Real-World Data Infrastructure to Support Real-World Evidence Development and Learning Healthcare Systems in Hematology in Blood Advances.

• Congratulations to Patrick Ryan, who was inducted into the American College of Medical Informatics Fellows Class of 2021 during the ongoing AMIA Symposium in San Diego. You can watch the introduction provided by Marc Overhage and George Hripcsak.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). There are several planned talks during the full-day event, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. More details have been posted to the OHDSI APAC page, and you can register for the symposium here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase began recently. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

Slides

Community Updates

Videos

Methods Research Breakout

Data Standards Breakout

Clinical Applications Breakout

Open-Source Development Breakout

Patrick Ryan led a Halloween-themed interactive demonstration of how you can use the OHDSI tools to quickly generate insights from your OMOP CDM.

Updates 

• Congratulations to the EHDEN Consortium on welcoming 21 new SMEs to support mapping to the OMOP Common Data Model, and perform services in the ecosystem of the EHDEN federated data network. EHDEN now has a total of 47 SMEs across 19 European nations to assist in real world evidence generation within the community.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). There are several planned talks during the full-day event, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. More details have been posted to the OHDSI APAC page, and you can register for the symposium here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase began recently. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

Slides 

Community Updates

Demo: Using OHDSI Tools To Quickly Generate Insights From Your OMOP CDM

LEGEND (Large-scale Evidence Generation and Evaluation across a Network of Databases) applies high-level analytics to perform observational research on hundreds of millions of patient records within OHDSI’s international database network. 

LEGEND principles have been applied to studying the effects of treatments for depression, hypertension, and COVID-19, and are being applied to Type 2 diabetes. The clinical impact of LEGEND has already been observed, with important evidence that promotes better health decisions published in Lancet, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Hypertension.

During the Oct. 19 OHDSI Community Call, we heard more about the LEGEND Initiative, its work around hypertension, and plans around Type 2 diabetes, from the following speakers: 

• Anna Ostropolets
• RuiJun “Ray” Chen
• Yuan Lu
• Rohan Khera
• Aki Nishimura
• Fan Bu
• Marc Suchard

Materials and links shared during the presentation (video is below)

Study Protocol | Study Package | Presentation Slides

Updates 

• All recordings, materials and resources from the two-day HL7 FHIR and OHDSI workshop have been made available here. Five subgroups have been added: Data Model Harmonization, Digital Quality Measurement, Oncology, Registries and Applications, and Terminologies. More information and links are available on this forum post.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). There are several planned talks during the full-day event, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. More details have been posted to the OHDSI APAC page, and you can register for the symposium here.

• The next CBER BEST Seminar Series presentation will be held Wednesday, Oct. 20, at 11 am ET. Nicola P. Klein, MD, PhD (Kaiser Permanente Division of Research) will discuss her work on Exploring Vaccine Safety Datalink COVID vaccine rapid cycle analysis (RCA) methods. You can register for this talk here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase began recently. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

Slides

The Legend Initiative | Community Updates

Video: The Legend Initiative

The Oct. 12 OHDSI Community Call paid tribute to the 2021 Titan Award honorees. How did they enhance OHDSI’s mission over the last year? What should the community know about their work? 

Besides recognizing the superb accomplishments of these eight community leaders, this meeting hopefully showed the type of global impact one person can make, and inspire others as our community moves towards 2022!

Our 2021 Titan Award honorees were:

Maxim Moinat (Data Standards)
Yong Chen (Methodological Research)
Adam Black (Open-Source Development)
Asieh Golozar (Clinical Applications)
Erica Voss (Community Collaboration)
Mui Van Zandt (Community Leadership)
Faaizah Arshad (Community Support)
Ross Williams (Community Support)

Updates 

• The recent LEGEND study, published in Hypertension, “Comparative First-Line Effectiveness and Safety of ACE (Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme) Inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers: A Multinational Cohort Study” was profiled recently in JAMA. Author Jennifer Abbasi wrote the article “Choose ARBs Over ACE Inhibitors for First-line Hypertension Treatment, Large New Analysis Suggests” recently, which includes quotes from lead author RuiJun Chen and senior author George Hripcsak.

• The LEGEND team is preparing to apply high-level analytics and its 10 Guiding Principles on hundreds of millions of patient records to study the effects of treatments on Type 2 diabetes (you will learn more about LEGEND during the Oct. 19 community call). The research protocol is now available as a preprint. Community feedback is welcome.

• All recordings, materials and resources from the two-day HL7 FHIR and OHDSI workshop have been made available here. Five subgroups have been added: Data Model Harmonization, Digital Quality Measurement, Oncology, Registries and Applications, and Terminologies. More information and links are available on this forum post.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). There are several planned talks during the full-day event, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. More details have been posted to the OHDSI APAC page, and you can register for the symposium here.

• The October edition of The Journey Newsletter came out recently, and it includes all the details of how to watch the 2021 Symposium, as well as the latest monthly podcast, information on the CDM v5.4, the “Our Journey: Where the OHDSI Community Has Been, and Where Are We Going” book, publications and presentations from September, and plenty more.

• The next CBER BEST Seminar Series presentation will be held Wednesday, Oct. 20, at 11 am ET. Nicola P. Klein, MD, PhD (Kaiser Permanente Division of Research) will discuss her work on Exploring Vaccine Safety Datalink COVID vaccine rapid cycle analysis (RCA) methods. You can register for this talk here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase began recently. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

Video: Meet The Titans

The Oct. 5 community call featured four new OHDSI workgroup updates:

• Clinical Trials (Mike Hamidi)
• Health Equity (Jake Gillberg)
• Phenotype Development & Evaluation (Gowtham Rao)
• Vaccine Vocabular y(Adam Black)

Updates 

• All video presentations and panels from the main two days of the OHDSI 2021 Global Symposium are now available here. More than 100 posters, demos and lightning talks from the Collaborator Showcase are also now available.

• Congratulations to Emily Pfaff, Andrew Girvin, Davera Gabriel, Kristin Kostka, Michele Morris, Matvey Palchuk, Harold Lehmann, Benjamin Amor, Mark Bissell, Katie Bradwell, Sigfried Gold, Stephanie Hong, Johanna Loomba, Amin Manna, Julie McMurry, Emily Niehaus, Nabeel Quresh, Anita Walden, Xiaohan Tanner Zhang, Richard Zhu, Richard Moffitt, Melissa Haendel, Christopher Chute, and the N3C Consortium on the publication of “Synergies between Centralized and Federated Approaches to Data Quality: A Report from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative” in JAMIA. 

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). There are several planned talks during the full-day event, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. More details have been posted to the OHDSI APAC page, and you can register for the symposium here.

• The October edition of The Journey Newsletter just came out, and it includes all the details of how to watch the 2021 Symposium, as well as the latest monthly podcast, information on the CDM v5.4, the “Our Journey: Where the OHDSI Community Has Been, and Where Are We Going” book, publications and presentations from September, and plenty more.

• The next CBER BEST Seminar Series presentation will be held Wednesday, Oct. 20, at 11 am ET. Nicola P. Klein, MD, PhD (Kaiser Permanente Division of Research) will discuss her work on Exploring Vaccine Safety Datalink COVID vaccine rapid cycle analysis (RCA) methods. You can register for this talk here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase began recently. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

Slides

Clinical Trials | Health Equity | Phenotype Development and Evaluation | Vaccine Vocabulary | Community Updates

Presentations

Clinical Trials (Mike Hamidi)

Health Equity (Jake Gillberg)

Phenotype Development and Evaluation (Gowtham Rao)

Vaccine Vocabulary (Adam Black)

The Sept. 28 Community Call introduced the community to the many workgroups available within OHDSI. Following community updates, we reopened Gathertown so collaborators could visit each workgroup and learn more about what has been done, and what is currently being worked on. 

Updates 

• All video presentations and panels from the main two days of the OHDSI 2021 Global Symposium are now available here. More than 100 posters, demos and lightning talks from the Collaborator Showcase are also now available.

• Congratulations to Yuan Peng, Azadeh Nassirian, Najia Ahmadi, Martin Sedlmayr, and Franziska Bathelt on the publication of “Towards the Representation of Genomic Data in HL7 FHIR and OMOP CDM” in Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• CDM v5.4 is officially available. Clair Blacketer provided some details in this forum post, as well as during the community call (5:43 mark of the video presentation below). We will plan to have a demo at a later community call.

• Registration is still open for a two-day HL7 FHIR/OMOP Workshop this Wednesday-Thursday. Concepts that will be explored during the workshop include how to build the community and engage participants, reviewing near-term challenges regarding mapping and other issues, and working to establish a collaboration framework for moving forward, including setup of specific subgroups to advance individual use cases. Registration links are available here.

• The 2021 APAC Symposium will be held Nov. 18 (APAC time zone). There are several planned talks during the full-day event, including ones focused on the FHIR/OHDSI collaboration, the APAC Chapter vision for 2022, the EHDEN consortium and state of the community talks for both the global community and the APAC community. You can register for the APAC Symposium here.

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase began today. Over the next few months, research from the OHDSI2021 Collaborator Showcase will be profiled each weekday on both the OHDSI Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Please follow and share to highlight the breadth of research happening around our community.

• The next CBER BEST Seminar Series presentation will be held Wednesday, Oct. 20, at 11 am ET. The speaker is being finalized, so more information is coming, but please save the date for the next presentation.

Video Presentations

Community Updates (including CDM v5.4 discussion)

The Sept. 21 Community Call welcomed newcomers to OHDSI following the 2021 symposium. Following a brief overview of the OHDSI community and its mission, there was a tour off all the material available on OHDSI.org. Four community leaders (Clair Blacketer, Paul Nagy, Faaizah Arshad and Dani Prieto-Alhambra) then discussed their roles and what inspires them about the community. 

Updates 

• All video presentations and panels from the main two days of the OHDSI 2021 Global Symposium are now available here. More than 100 posters, demos and lightning talks from the Collaborator Showcase are also now available.

• Congratulations to Sara Khalid, Cynthia Yang, Clair Blacketer, Talita Duarte-Salles, Sergio Fernández-Bertolín, Chungsoo Kim, Rae Woong Park, Jimyung Park, Martijn Schuemie, Anthony Sena, Marc Suchard, Seng ChanYou, Peter Rijnbeek, and Jenna Reps on the publication of “A standardized analytics pipeline for reliable and rapid development and validation of prediction models using observational health data” in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine.

• Registration is open for a two-day HL7 FHIR/OMOP Workshop. Concepts that will be explored during the workshop include how to build the community and engage participants, reviewing near-term challenges regarding mapping and other issues, and working to establish a collaboration framework for moving forward, including setup of specific subgroups to advance individual use cases. Registration links are available here.

• Paul Nagy provided a recent Grand Rounds presentation on the Johns Hopkins OHDSI community and the road to reproducible research on medical records. That presentation is available here.

Video Presentations

OHDSI Overview (Patrick Ryan)

Tour of the OHDSI website (Craig Sachson)

Meet the Community (Clair Blacketer, Paul Nagy, Faaizah Arshad, Dani Prieto-Alhambra)

The Sept. 7 Community Call focused on the final logistics of the 2021 Global Symposium, including a look at the two plenary sessions.

Updates 

• We have a new homepage for the full #OHDSI2021 agenda, which you can find here. Please share this with your respective networks, and register if you have not done so yet. The symposium will be held virtually Sept. 12-15. 

• Congratulations to Dani Prieto-Alhambra, who has been elected as Academic Director for Europe/Africa for the 2021-2022 ISPE Board of Directors.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared that the University of Oxford has openings for 2 Senior Statistician/ Senior Data Scientists within his team. More details and an application link are available here. The deadline for application is 12 pm local time on September 20, 2021.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be Wednesday, September 8, at 11 am. Robert Platt (McGill University) will present a talk on “COVID-19 pharmacoepidemiology in Canada.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link are available here.

Video Presentation

The August 24 Community Call had a theme of “Back To School” and shared some educational opportunities within the community. Among the topics discussed were:

• the recent CDM Hack-a-thon (Clair Blacketer)
• the recent APAC ETL tutorials (Mui Van Zandt)
• the Roux Institue, the Book of OHDSI, and the OHDSI forums (Kristin Kostka)
• the EHDEN Academy and OHDSI tutorials (Patrick Ryan)

Updates 

• We have a new homepage for the full #OHDSI2021 agenda, which you can find here. Please share this with your respective networks, and register if you have not done so yet. The symposium will be held virtually Sept. 12-15. 

• The OHDSI and EHDEN communities have been well-represented at #ICPE2021. Between our two networks, we have participated in at least three workshops, 12 oral presentations and nine posters.

• Congratulations to Dani Prieto-Alhambra, who has been elected as Academic Director for Europe/Africa for the 2021-2022 ISPE Board of Directors.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared that the University of Oxford has openings for 2 Senior Statistician/ Senior Data Scientists within his team. More details and an application link are available here. The deadline for application is 12 pm local time on September 20, 2021.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be Wednesday, September 8, at 11 am. Robert Platt (McGill University) will present a talk on “COVID-19 pharmacoepidemiology in Canada.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link are available here.

• The 2021 Titan Award nominations are open! The OHDSI Titan Awards serve to recognize those who have gone above and beyond to foster community engagement, lead research and development efforts and make significant contributions towards OHDSI’s mission. This is the fourth year for the OHDSI Titan Awards, and we ask members of the community to nominate individuals, teams or institutions who they want to be considered for this honor. Please make your nomination(s) here; the deadline is August 30 (5 pm ET).

Video Presentation

The August 17 Community Call focused on “New Developments in OHDSI” and it featured four presentations.

• Ajit Londhe (Advancements to ATLAS)
• Hongfang Liu (Innovations in NLP for OMOP CDM)
• Namki Hong (Improvement of Cohort Selection Performance by SNOMED CT for Rare Endocrine Diseases: RED-CDM Study)
• David Eichmann (The Meta-Information Architecture of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative

Updates 

• Congratulations to the team of Selva Muthu Kumaran Sathappan, Young Seok Jeon, Trung Kien Dang, Su Chi Lim, Yi-Ming Shao, E Shyong Tai, Mengling Feng for the recent publication of Transformation of Electronic Health Records and Questionnaire Data to OMOP CDM: A Feasibility Study Using SG_T2DM Dataset in Applied Clinical Informatics.

• The CDM Working Group will be holding a Hack-a-Thon on August 18-19. In preparation for the symposium, the team will be readying CDM v5.4 by writing both R code and documentation of the model. Everybody is welcome to join, regardless of skill level. If you plan to join the hack-a-thon, please fill out this form. It will begin Wednesday at 10 am ET in this channel. 

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be Wednesday, September 8, at 11 am. Robert Platt (McGill University) will present a talk on “COVID-19 pharmacoepidemiology in Canada.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link are available here.

• The latest edition of The Journey, OHDSI’s official newsletter, has been posted. You can read the newsletter, which includes all updates from July, by clicking here.

• The 2021 Titan Award nominations are open! The OHDSI Titan Awards serve to recognize those who have gone above and beyond to foster community engagement, lead research and development efforts and make significant contributions towards OHDSI’s mission. This is the fourth year for the OHDSI Titan Awards, and we ask members of the community to nominate individuals, teams or institutions who they want to be considered for this honor. Please make your nomination(s) here; the deadline is August 30 (5 pm ET).

Video Presentations

Ajit Londhe (Advancements to ATLAS)

Hongfang Liu (Innovations in NLP for OMOP CDM)

Namki Hong (Improvement of Cohort Selection Performance by SNOMED CT for Rare Endocrine Diseases: RED-CDM Study)

https://youtu.be/w1fd9v–Usg

• David Eichmann (The Meta-Information Architecture of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative)

The August 10 Community Call featured a preview of the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium, which will be held virtually Sept. 12-15. The full presentation is below, but registrations opened for the Sunday tutorial, Monday workshop, and the main symposium on Tuesday and Wednesday. Links and agenda are below:

Sunday, September 12:  Building Conceptsets Tutorial
Please check out our Conceptsets Tutorial homepage and note the limitations on registration so be sure to sign up soon!

Monday, September 13: OHDSI Reproducibility Challenge Workshop
Please check out our OHDSI Reproducibility Challenge Workshop homepage and note the limitations on registration for workshop collaborators; there is no registration limit for workshop observers.

Tuesday, September 14:
8 am – 9 am ET: State of the Community
9 am – 12 pm ET: Plenary session “OHDSI Impact on Covid-19 pandemic”
1 pm – 5 pm ET: Collaborator Showcase
5 pm ET: Networkin

Wednesday, September 15:
3 am – 7 am ET: Collaborator Showcase
8 am – 12 pm ET: Plenary “Generating Reliable Evidence”
1 pm ET: Networking

Helpful links:
• Main Symposium Registration
• Titan Award Nominations
• Who am I? Name that Collaborator! (google.com)

Updates 

• The CDM Working Group will be holding a Hack-a-Thon on August 18-19. In preparation for the symposium, the team will be readying CDM v5.4 by writing both R code and documentation of the model. Everybody is welcome to join, regardless of skill level.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be Wednesday, September 8, at 11 am. Robert Platt (McGill University) will present a talk on “COVID-19 pharmacoepidemiology in Canada.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link are available here.

• The latest edition of The Journey, OHDSI’s official newsletter, has been posted. You can read the newsletter, which includes all updates from July, by clicking here.

• The 2021 Titan Award nominations are open! The OHDSI Titan Awards serve to recognize those who have gone above and beyond to foster community engagement, lead research and development efforts and make significant contributions towards OHDSI’s mission. This is the fourth year for the OHDSI Titan Awards, and we ask members of the community to nominate individuals, teams or institutions who they want to be considered for this honor. Please make your nomination(s) here; the deadline is August 30 (5 pm ET).

Slides

Symposium Preview | Community Updates

Video Presentation

The August 3 community call featured updates on the exciting progress being made within the Asia-Pacific region. Leaders from our six APAC chapters shared presentations during the meeting:

• Roger Ward (Australia)

• Hua Xu (China)

• Tatsuo Hiramatsu (Japan)

• Mengling ‘Mornin’ Feng (Singapore)

• Seng Chan You (South Korea)

• Jason Hsu (Taiwan)

Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Clair Blacketer, Frank Defalco, Patrick Ryan, and Peter Rijnbeek on the publication of “Increasing trust in real-world evidence through evaluation of observational data quality” in Hypertension.

• Thank you to the Scientific Review Committee, who reviewed more than 110 collaborator showcase submissions over the last month. Notifications of acceptances are being sent out early this week; if you did not hear anything, please reach out to symposium@ohdsi.org. The 2021 Scientific Review Committee is comprised of Nsikak Akpakpan, Juan Banda, Maytal Bivas-Benita, Adrien Coulet, Jon Duke, Leanne Goldstein, Jill Hardin, Elisse Katzman, Kristin Kostka, Christophe Lambert, Rupa Makadia, Melanie Philofsky, Jose Posada, Hanieh Razzaghi, Patrick Ryan, Craig Sachson, Sarah Seager, Mui Van Zandt, Rohit Vashisht, Andrew Williams, Chen Yanover, and Seng Chan You. 

• There will be a one-hour inaugural open HL7-OHDSI meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 4 at 10 am ET). This meeting goal is to review and update plans for the collaboration, and discuss how members of the community can get involved. Speakers will include Ed Hammond, George Hripcsak, Wayne Kubick (HL7), Christian Reich (OHDSI), Floyd Eisenberg (HL7), and Jon Duke (OHDSI). You can register for this meeting here.

• The CDM Working Group will be holding a Hack-a-Thon on August 18-19. In preparation for the symposium, the team will be readying CDM v5.4 by writing both R code and documentation of the model. Everybody is welcome to join, regardless of skill level.

• Nega Gebreyesus announced the formation of the Africa Chapter within the OHDSI community during last week’s community call. If you want to join this chapter (or any workgroup), please fill out this form.

• The 2021 Titan Award nominations are now open! The OHDSI Titan Awards serve to recognize those who have gone above and beyond to foster community engagement, lead research and development efforts and make significant contributions towards OHDSI’s mission. This is the fourth year for the OHDSI Titan Awards, and we ask members of the community to nominate individuals, teams or institutions who they want to be considered for this honor. Please make your nomination(s) here; the deadline is August 30 (5 pm ET).

Video Presentation

(updates by Roger Ward, Hua Xu, Tatsuo Hiramatsu, Mengling ‘Mornin’ Feng, Seng Chan You, Jason Hsu)

The July 27 OHDSI Community Call focused on visualizations around Health Equity, and it also included a report from the HADES Unit-Test-A-Thon. 

This was the second visualization challenge we have held during a community call, and we were happy to hear from Jake Gillberg, Joel Swerdel, Tony Sun, Jody-Ann McLeggon and Adam Black on this topic. You can still participate in this challenge by posting a visualization to the “OHDSI Viz Challenge July2021 Health Equity” channel on the main OHDSI team.

Also, Hina Khan, Adam Black and Martijn Schuemie joined the community call to discuss the HADES Unit-Test-A-Thon and its impact.

Updates

• Congratulations to the team of RuiJun Chen, Marc Suchard, Harlan Krumholz, Martijn Schuemie, Steven Shea, Jon Duke, Nicole Pratt, Christian Reich, David Madigan, Seng Chan You, Patrick Ryan, and George Hripcsak on the publication of “Comparative First-Line Effectiveness and Safety of ACE (Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme) Inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers: A Multinational Cohort Study” in Hypertension.

• Congratulations to Nicholas Giangreco and Nicholas Tatonetti on the publication of “Evaluating risk detection methods to uncover ontogenic-mediated adverse drug effect mechanisms in children” in BioData Mining.

• Congratulations to Jin Ge, Mark Pletcher, Jennifer Lai, and members of the N3C Consortium on the publication of “Outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Patients with Chronic Liver Disease and Cirrhosis: a N3C Study” in Gastroenterology.

• Nega Gebreyesus announced the formation of the Africa Chapter within the OHDSI community. If you want to join this chapter (or any workgroup), please fill out this form.

• The OHDSI and EHDEN communities collaborated to host an E-Thon last week to expand the AESI study to new databases around Europe. Thanks to Kees van Bochove and Erica Voss for sharing about this during the call.

• The next APAC community call will be Thursday, and it will feature a presentation on the EUMAEUS (Evaluating Use of Methods for Adverse Event Under Surveillance) study. This will be from the June 29 OHDSI community call.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra announced to the community that his team at Oxford received NIHR funding to study the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on preventing Long COVID: a population-based cohort study using linked NHS data. Please reach out to Dani if you would like to collaborate with him.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, July 28, at 11 am. Jessica Gronsbell (University of Toronto) will present a talk on “Statistical learning with electronic health records data.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link are available here.

• The CDM Working Group will be holding a Hack-a-Thon on August 18-19. In preparation for the symposium, the team will be readying CDM v5.4 by writing both R code and documentation of the model. Everybody is welcome to join, regardless of skill level.

• There will be a one-hour inaugural open HL7-OHDSI meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 4 at 10 am ET). This meeting goal is to provide an update on plans for the collaboration, and learn how you can get involved. Speakers will include Ed Hammond, George Hripcsak, Wayne Kubick (HL7), Christian Reich (OHDSI), Floyd Eisenberg (HL7), and Jon Duke (OHDSI). Look for more information in the coming days on the forum.

Slides

Community Updates

Videos

HADES Unit-Test-A-Thon Report

Health Equity Visualizations

The July 20 OHDSI Community Call featured our fourth set of workgroup presentations at our weekly community call. We were excited to hear about four working groups:

• Early-Stage Researchers (Faaizah Arshad and Ross Williams)

• Women of OHDSI (Maura Beaton)

• Latin America (Jose Posada)

• Education (Nigel Hughes)

Updates

• The HADES Unit-Test-A-Thon was a terrific success, with 16 of the 20 HADES packages finishing the three-day event above the goal of 80% coverage (prior to the start, only six packages were there). Martijn Schuemie gave a brief talk on the unit-test-a-thon, but there will be a more in-depth discussion about it during the July 27 community call. 

• Congratulations to the team of Martina Recalde, Elena Roel, Andrea Pistillo, Anthony Sena, Albert Prats-Uribe, Waheed-Ul-Rahman Ahmed, Heba Alghoul, Thamir Alshammari, Osaid Alser, Carlos Areia, Edward Burn, Paula Casajust, Dalia Dawoud, Scott DuVall, Thomas Falconer, Sergio Fernández-Bertolín, Asieh Golozar, Mengchun Gong, Lana Yin Hui Lai, Jennifer Lane, Kristine Lynch, Michael Matheny, Paras Mehta, Daniel Morales, Karthik Natarjan, Fredrik Nyberg, Jose Posada, Christian Reich, Peter Rijnbeek, Lisa Schilling, Karishma Shah, Nigam Shah, Vignesh Subbian, Lin Zhang, Hong Zhu, Patrick Ryan, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, Kristin Kostka and Talita Duarte-Salles on the publication of Characteristics and outcomes of 627 044 COVID-19 patients living with and without obesity in the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom in the International Journal of Obesity.

• Congratulations to the team of Elena Roel, Andrea Pistillo, Martina Recalde, Anthony Sena, Sergio Fernandez-Bertolin, Maria Aragon, Diana Puente, Waheed-Ul-Rahman Ahmed, Heba Alghoul, Osaid Alser, Thamir Alshammari, Carlos Areia, Clair Blacketer, William Carter, Paula Casajust, Aedín Culhane, Dalia Dawoud, Frank DeFalco, Scott DuVall, Thomas Falconer, Asieh Golozar, Mengchun Gong, Laura Hester, George Hripcsak, Eng Hooi Tan, Hokyun Jeon, Jitendra Jonnagaddala, Lana Lai, Kristine Lynch, Michael Matheny, Daniel Morales, Karthik Natarajan, Fredrik Nyberg, Anna Ostropolets, Jose Posada, Albert Prats-Uribe, Christian Reich, Donna Rivera, Lisa Schilling, Isabelle Soerjomataram, Karishma Shah, Nigam Shah, Yang Shen, Matthew Spotnitz, Vignesh Subbian, Marc Suchard, Annalisa Trama, Lin Zhang, Ying Zhang, Patrick Ryan, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, Kristin Kostka and Talita Duarte-Salles on the publication of Characteristics and outcomes of over 300,000 COVID-19 individuals with history of cancer in the United States and Spain in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

• Congratulations to the team of Anna Ostropolets, Xintong Li, Rupa Makadia, Gowtham Rao, Peter Rijnbeek, Talita Duarte-Salles, Anthony Sena, Azza Shaoibi, Marc Suchard, Patrick Ryan, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra and George Hripcsak on this recent preprint posted on MedRxiv: Empirical evaluation of the sensitivity of background incidence rate characterization for adverse events across an international observational data network. Community feedback is welcome!

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra announced to the community that his team at Oxford received NIHR funding to study the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on preventing Long COVID: a population-based cohort study using linked NHS data. Please reach out to Dani if you would like to collaborate with him.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, July 28, at 11 am. Jessica Gronsbell (University of Toronto) will present a talk on “Statistical learning with electronic health records data.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link are available here. ** Please note this is a NEW link than from previous updates. **

• Peter Rijnbeek recently shared the news that the EMA has launched a new call for tenders for Real World Data subscription. The purpose of the call is to get access to and use of a set of individual patient-level databases drawn from the population receiving primary care, specialist care or hospital care in the EEA countries. The application deadline is July 30, and more information is available here.

• The OHDSI APAC team announced that there will be a 2-day ETL training on August 12-13 (APAC time zone). This training will include the source data analysis, ETL development, and data quality check aspects of an OMOP conversion process. The registration deadline is July 23, and you can register here.

Slides

Early-Stage Researchers WG | Women of OHDSI WG | Latin America WG | Education WG | Community Updates

Videos

Early-Stage Researchers (presented by Faaizah Arshad and Ross Williams)

Women of OHDSI (presented by Maura Beaton)

Latin America (presented by Jose Posada)

Education (presented by Nigel Hughes)

The PROTEUS (Predicting & Recalibrating Outcomes Toward External Understanding Study) study was presented during our July 13 Community Call.

The foundation of this study took place during the 2020 OHDSI Global Symposium. The presentation was led by the two study leaders, David Kent (Professor of Medicine, Clinical & Translational Science Tufts Medical Center) and Benjamin Wessler (Director, Valve Center; Assistant Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine). 

Updates

• The HADES Unit-Test-A-Thon will be held this Wednesday-Friday (July 14-16). Its goal is to increase the coverage of all HADES packages to above 80%. If you have R experience, this is a great opportunity for you to improve the reliability of HADES tools (which are critical to our community success), learn more about OHDSI software and have fun with collaborators around the world. There is more information on this forum post. If you would like to take part in this activity, please fill out this form.

• The next APAC Community Call will be held Thursday, July 15 (July 14 in parts of the Western Hemisphere), and will include two main tutorial topics: Seng Chan You will provide “An Introduction to the OMOP Oncology Module,” while Jing Li will present on “How to do a network study.” These calls take place within the OHDSI APAC team, though a direct link can be found on the OHDSI APAC page.

• Two recent presentations from our APAC Community Calls are now available. Lei Liu presented on Applying the OMOP CDM to Hepatobiliary Clinical Research Database at Zhongshan during the June 17 call, while Seng Chan You, Hua Xu, Tatsuo Hiramatsu, Jason C. Hsu, and Roger Ward provided regional mid-year updates during the July 1 call.

• Peter Rijnbeek recently shared the news that the EMA has launched a new call for tenders for Real World Data subscription. The purpose of the call is to get access to and use of a set of individual patient-level databases drawn from the population receiving primary care, specialist care or hospital care in the EEA countries. The application deadline is July 30, and more information is available here.

• OHDSI follows the ICMJE guidelines for authorship requirements. Our community has significant collaboration on many studies, and at times it can be challenging to determine who qualifies for authorship on an OHDSI scientific paper. The OHDSI Steering Group recently created this OHDSI Authorship Guidance sheet, which can help establish clear guidelines in the process. This form is available on OHDSI.org under both the “OHDSI Studies” and “Resources” dropdowns.

• The OHDSI APAC team announced that there will be a 2-day ETL training on August 12-13 (APAC time zone). This training will include the source data analysis, ETL development, and data quality check aspects of an OMOP conversion process. The registration deadline is July 23, and you can register here.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, July 28, at 11 am. Jessica Gronsbell (University of Toronto) will present a talk on “Statistical learning with electronic health records data.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here.

Slides

PROTEUS | Community Updates

Video: PROTEUS Presentation

Several global collaborators, including many newcomers making their first introduction to the community, joined the OHDSI Meet-and-Greet session during the July 6 Community Call. They shared a bit about their backgrounds, how they hope to help the OHDSI community in its mission, and how OHDSI can support their efforts. The full meet and greet is posted, and individual introductions are time-stamped below.

Brianne Olivieri-Mui (0:00); Nick Giangreco (1:55); Adam Black (4:49); Karen Crowley (7:10); Harold Lehmann (10:00); Tina French (11:30); Aileen Prior (18:47); Aki Nishimura (23:20); Emily Scott (25:45); Mary Grace Bowring (26:18); Jacob Zelko (27:20); Morgan Cappa (30:22); Qian Zhu (31:48); John Gresh (35:13 / 37:37); Filip Maljkovic (36:15); Alexander Haslam (40:30); Behzad Naderalvojoud (42:09); Julie Lamoureux (45:26); Jody-Ann McLeggon (47:25).

Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Christophe Gaudet-Blavignac, Jean Louis, Vasundra Touré, Sabine Österle, Katrin Crameri, and Christian Lovis on the recent study “A National, Semantic-Driven, Three-Pillar Strategy to Enable Health Data Secondary Usage Interoperability for Research Within the Swiss Personalized Health Network: Methodological Study” recently published in JMIR Medical Informatics. 

• Congratulations to the team of João Rafael Almeida, João Figueira Silva, Sérgio Matos, and José Luís Oliveira on the study “A Two-Stage Workflow to Extract and Harmonize Drug Mentions from Clinical Notes into Observational Databases” published last week in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

• There will be a HADES Unit-Test-A-Thon held July 14-16, which aims to increase the coverage of all HADES packages to above 80%. If you have R experience, this is a great opportunity for you to improve the reliability of HADES tools (which are critical to our community success), learn more about OHDSI software and have fun with collaborators around the world. There is more information on this forum post. If you would like to take part in this activity, please fill out this form.

• The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available, and it includes information on OHDSI work around vaccine surveillance and health equity, as well as more updates around our community and links to recent publications and presentations. If you aren’t receiving our monthly newsletter, please subscribe here.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, July 28, at 11 am. Jessica Gronsbell (University of Toronto) will present a talk on “Statistical learning with electronic health records data.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here.

Slides

Community Updates

Video: Meet and Greet

The June 29 OHDSI community call featured a presentation on our EUMAEUS (Evaluating Use of Methods for Adverse Event Under Surveillance) study. Topics and presenters for this presentation are below

• Literature Review (Lana Lai, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Manchester)
• Overview of the EUMAEUS Experiment Design (Marc Suchard, Professor, Department of Biomathematics, UCLA)
• Bias, Precision and Timeliness of Historical Rate Comparison Methods (Xintong Li, DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford)
• Combining Methods in a Safety Surveillance System (Faaizah Arshad, Undergraduate, UCLA)
• Estimating for Two-Dose Vaccines (Ty Stanford, Data Analyst/Bioinformatician, University of South Australia)
• Comparison of Performance Across Methods (Martijn Schuemie, Research Fellow, Epidemiology Analytics, Janssen Research and Development)

Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Noha Sharafeldin, Benjamin Bates, Qianqian Song, Vithal Madhira, Yao Yan, Sharlene Dong, Eileen Lee, Nathaniel Kuhrt, Yu Raymond Shao, Feifan Liu, Timothy Bergquist, Justin Guinney, Jing Su, and Umit Topaloglu on this N3C study “Outcomes of COVID-19 in Patients With Cancer: Report From the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)” recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, July 28, at 11 am. Jessica Gronsbell (University of Toronto) will present a talk on “Statistical learning with electronic health records data.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here. 

• On July 6, we will have a community call focused on getting to know some newer members of the community. Many of you may have found OHDSI within the last year, and you may even participate in some studies or workgroups, but we would like to give people the opportunity to introduce themselves to the broader community. We would enjoy hearing how you got here and how you hope to become involved in the community, and also how you hope the community can help you. If you would be interested in taking part in this, please reach out to Craig Sachson (sachson@ohdsi.org), who is planning the session.

• The deadline for abstract submissions for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium has passed, and we received more than 110 submissions this year. The Scientific Review Committee will begin studying the submissions this week. If you have been selected to present your work for the 2021 Symposium Collaborators Showcase, you will be notified via email by Monday, August 2.

Slides

EUMAEUS Presentation | Community Updates

EUMAEUS Presentation

The June 22 meeting featured a community brainstorm on how OHDSI can make an impact in the area of Health Equity. The conversation focused on two main topics:
1) What are the biggest challenges in the area of health equity research?
2) How can/should OHDSI, and specifically the OHDSI Health Equity Workgroup, make an impact around this important topic? 

Moderators for the session were:
• Noémie Elhadad (Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics; Vice Chair, Research, Columbia University)
• Jake Gillberg (Health Equity WG Lead; Software Development Analyst, Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute)
• Jody-Ann McLeggon (Program Manager, OHDSI and Columbia University)

The conversation can continue in the new Health Equity Brainstorm channel in the general OHDSI Team, as well as a Health Equity whiteboard within that channel. Please share your thoughts, concerns, prior research, or anything you believe can help our community efforts in this important area.

Updates

• Congratulations to the Columbia University team of Junghwan Lee, Cong Liu, Jae Hyun Kim, Alex Butler, Ning Shang, Chao Pang, Karthik Natarajan, Patrick Ryan, Casey Ta, and Chunhua Weng for the study “Comparative effectiveness of medical concept embedding for feature engineering in phenotyping” that was recently published recently in JAMIA Open.

• Congratulations to Tarun Karthik Kumar Mamidi, Thi Tran-Nguyen, Ryan Melvin and Elizabeth Worthey for the study “Development of An Individualized Risk Prediction Model for COVID-19 Using Electronic Health Record Data” that was published recently in Frontiers in Big Data.

• Congratulations to the EHDEN Consortium, which added 41 new data partners in its most recent open call. Seven new European nations (Greece, Bulgaria, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Luxembourg) will join a network that will include 101 data partners when harmonization has competed this fall. EHDEN was also pleased to welcome 12 new data partners which have a focus on oncology.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, July 28, at 11 am. Jessica Gronsbell (University of Toronto) will present a talk on “Statistical learning with electronic health records data.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here.

• On July 6, we will have a community call focused on getting to know some newer members of the community. Many of you may have found OHDSI within the last year, and you may even participate in some studies or workgroups, but we would like to give people the opportunity to introduce themselves to the broader community. We would enjoy hearing how you got here and how you hope to become involved in the community, and also how you hope the community can help you. If you would be interested in taking part in this, please reach out to Craig Sachson (sachson@ohdsi.org), who is planning the session.

• The deadline for abstract submissions for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium has passed, and we received more than 110 submissions this year. The Scientific Review Committee will begin studying the submissions this week. If you have been selected to present your work for the 2021 Symposium Collaborators Showcase, you will be notified via email by Monday, August 2.

Slides

Community Updates

Brainstorm Recording

The June 15 Community Call focused on professional development breakout discussions. The four areas of focus (and conversation moderators) were: 

• Clinical Epidemiology (Moderators: Talita Duarte-Salles and Dani Prieto-Alhambra)
• Information/Data Management (Moderators: Maxim Moinat and Mui Van Zandt)
• Open-Source Software Development (Moderators: Greg Klebanov and Kees van Bochove)
• Statistical Methods (Moderators: Yong Chen and Marc Suchard)

Updates

• Congratulations to Xintong Li, Anna Ostropolets, Rupa Makadia, Azza Shoaibi, Gowtham Rao, Anthony Sena, Eugenia Martinez-Hernandez, Antonella Delmestri, Katia Verhamme, Peter Rijnbeek, Talita Duarte-Salles, Marc Suchard, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, for this recent study “Characterising the background incidence rates of adverse events of special interest for covid-19 vaccines in eight countries: multinational network cohort study” that was posted today in The BMJ. You can learn more about this study in this OHDSI press release.

• The next APAC Community Call will be June 17 and will focus on OHDSI Projects. Professor Lei Liu of Fudan University will provide a presentation on “Applying the OMOP CDM to Hepatobiliary Clinical Research Database at Zhongshan Hospital. Also, Mui Van Zandt will lead a discussion about collecting attitudinal information from the community to support planning and activities. This call will be held in MS Teams; if you don’t have access to this team, please fill out this form.

• The format of the June 22 OHDSI community call has been changed. We will now have a community brainstorm on how OHDSI should focus on Health Inequities. This conversation will be open to everybody on the call, and it will help inform the new Health Equity Workgroup, which will meet for the first time later in the month.

• Priya Desai alerted the community about a clinical data scientist opening that will be posted shortly with the Research IT group of the Technology and Digital Solutions team at Stanford Health Care. Look for a forum posting soon, but if you have immediate questions or interest, you can reach out to Priya at prd@stanford.edu.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, June 16, at 11 am. Bruce Fireman (Kaiser Permanente) will present a talk on “Methods for Monitoring the Safety and Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here.

• The deadline for abstract submissions for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium is THIS WEEK (June 18, 2021 at 8 pm ET). We are accepting submissions for posters, oral presentations and software demonstrations. For more information, including the submission template, please check out the Showcase homepage. There was also a brief presentation during last week’s community call about submitting your brief reports, which you can see here.

Slides

Community Updates

Breakout Recordings

Clinical Epidemiology

Information/Data Management

Open-Source Software Development

Statistical Methods

In our second session of “10-Minute Tutorials” we were excited to have three community veterans share the following presentations on open-source tools. Videos of these tutorials are posted below.

• PHOEBE (Anna Ostropolets)
• Cohort Diagnostics (Gowtham Rao)
• ATC Hierarchy (Christian Reich)

Updates

• Congratulations to Gyu Lee Kim, Yu Hyeon Yi, Hye Rim Hwang, Jinmi Kim, Youngmin Park, Yun Jin Kim, Jeong Gyu Lee, Young Jin Tak, Seung Hun Lee, Sang Yeoup Lee, Youn Hye Cho, Eun Ju Park, and Youngin Lee for this recent study “The Risk of Osteoporosis and Osteoporotic Fracture Following the Use of Irritable Bowel Syndrome Medical Treatment: An Analysis Using the OMOP CDM Database” that was posted last week in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.

• Last week’s APAC Community Call featured two exciting APAC Network Research presentations, both of which have been posted to the website. Byungkon Kang presented on Automated terminology mapping via deep learning-based semantic matching, while Ty Stanford presented on the LEGEND Shiny App. The next APAC Community Call will be June 17 and will be held in MS Teams; if you don’t have access to this team, please fill out this form.

• The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter “The Journey” was published last week and it includes information on the two CHARYBDIS studies posted last month, the work with the PIONEER Prostate Cancer team, links to community call presentations, the monthly video podcast, and much more. If you didn’t receive it, you can subscribe to The Journey here.

• Dave Kern shared an opening for Associate Director in Epidemiology within Janssen R&D. The epidemiologist will support the ‘Real-World Assessment and Research of Drug Performance’ (REWARD) initiative, an ambitious collaborative effort to develop a systematic process for observational database analyses to enable exploration and identification of differentiated benefits of medical products to support R&D’s clinical development strategy. This position will also perform pharmacoepidemiology activities to support the neuroscience therapeutic area, including characterizing disease natural history and treatment patterns, safety evaluations, benefit- risk assessments, and patient-level prediction models. More information and an application link are available here.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be Wednesday, June 16, at 11 am. Bruce Fireman (Kaiser Permanente) will present a talk on “Methods for Monitoring the Safety and Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here. 

• The deadline for abstract submissions for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium is less than two weeks away (June 18, 2021 at 8 pm ET). We are accepting submissions for posters, oral presentations and software demonstrations. For more information, including the submission template, please check out the Showcase homepage. There was also a brief presentation during last week’s community call about submitting your brief reports, which you can see here.

Slides

Video Presentations

PHOEBE (Anna Ostropolets)

Cohort Diagnostics (Gowtham Rao)

ATC Hierarchy (Christian Reich)

Patrick Ryan provided this mid-year update on where the OHDSI community, as well as several workgroups, stand in relation to 2021 Objectives & Key Results (OKR), as set in the beginning of the year. As a reminder, these three OKRs were set as 2021 goals for the OHDSI community:

1) Generate and disseminate real-world evidence about the 3 substantial public health issues: COVID-19, type 2 diabetes, and health inequalities
2) Enable a community to generate real-world evidence using OHDSI tools and scientific best practices
3) Build an international medical product safety surveillance system that provides all stakeholders access to evidence about the incidence and risk of outcomes associated with drug exposure

Where is OHDSI on pace, and where does it need to ramp up its efforts. Check out this presentation and Join The Journey with our community for the rest of 2021 and beyond!

Updates

• Congratulations to Talita Duarte-Salles, David Vizcaya, Andrea Pistillo, Paula Casajust, Anthony G. Sena, Lana Yin Hui Lai, Albert Prats-Uribe, Waheed-Ul-Rahman Ahmed, Thamir M Alshammari, Heba Alghoul, Osaid Alser, Edward Burn, Seng Chan You, Carlos Areia, Clair Blacketer, Scott DuVall, Thomas Falconer, Sergio Fernandez-Bertolin, Stephen Fortin, Asieh Golozar, Mengchun Gong, Eng Hooi Tan, Vojtech Huser, Pablo Iveli, Daniel R. Morales, Fredrik Nyberg, Jose D. Posada, Martina Recalde, Elena Roe, Lisa M. Schilling, Nigam H. Shah, Karishma Shah, Marc A. Suchard, Lin Zhang, Ying Zhang, Andrew E. Williams, Christian G. Reich, George Hripcsak, Peter Rijnbeek, Patrick Ryan, Kristin Kostka and Daniel Prieto-Alhambra for this CHARYBDIS study “30-Day Outcomes of Children and Adolescents With COVID-19: An International Experience” that was posted last week in Pediatrics.

There is a press release on this study on the OHDSI Updates & News page. 

• The most recent Asia-Pacific (APAC) Community Call featured 10-minute tutorials that have now been posted to the APAC Community Call page. The tutorials focused on White Rabbit (Xialin Wang), USAGI (Seng Chan You) and Data Quality Dashboard (Selva Muthu Kumaran Sathappan). Due to technical issues, the DQD video ended prematurely; we apologize for not having the full tutorial.

• The next APAC Community Call will be this Thursday/Wednesday, and the focus will be APAC Network Research. Byungkon Kang will present on Automated terminology mapping via deep learning-based semantic matching, while Ty Stanford will present on the LEGEND Shiny App. The APAC Community Calls are held in MS Teams; if you don’t have access to this team, please fill out this form.

• There is a job opening for Senior Manager, Clinical Informatics at Regeneron. The company is seeking candidates with experience in ML/analytics and OHDSI. The full description and link to apply are available here.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be Wednesday, June 16, at 11 am. Bruce Fireman (Kaiser Permanente) will present a talk on “Methods for Monitoring the Safety and Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here.

• The deadline for abstract submissions for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium is less than THREE WEEKS away (June 18, 2021). We are accepting submissions for posters, oral presentations and software demonstrations. For more information, including the submission template, please check out the Showcase homepage. There was also a brief presentation during last week’s community call about submitting your brief reports, which you can see here.

Slides

OHDSI OKR Mid-Year Review Presentation (Patrick Ryan)

The OHDSI Community Call took a break from serious science and spent May 25 on fun and games. Patrick Ryan led the community in 3 different interactive games: 3 Degrees of OHDSI.org, Two (Eight?) Truths and a Lie, and Name That Tune. Check out the fun in the recording below!

Updates

• Congratulations to Hyunah Shin and Suehyun Lee on this study published by BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making: An OMOP-CDM based pharmacovigilance data-processing pipeline (PDP) providing active surveillance for ADR signal detection from real-world data sources. 

• Both Patrick Ryan and Nigam Shah presented during the Building Data Capacity for Patient Centered Outcomes Research: Data Standards, Methods, and Policy Workshop for The National Academies on May 24. Patrick presented a session entitled Building Data Capacity for Patient Centered Outcomes Research: Perspectives from the OHDSI community, while Nigam presented on Building Data Capacity for Patient Centered Outcomes Research. Links in the titles go to their slides.

• The EHDEN Consortium announced that the fourth open data partner call welcomed 55 applicants from 20 European nations. The Data Source Prioritisation Committee (DSPC) is now reviewing these applications, which covers more than 80 million patient records.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series will be Wednesday, June 16, at 11 am. Bruce Fireman (Kaiser Permanente) will present a talk on “Methods for Monitoring the Safety and Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” The seminar series is open to everybody. More information and a registration link is available here.

• The second edition of the CBER Best Seminar Series, which featured Ben Goldstein’s presentation on “Understanding Informed Presence in Electronic Health Records” is available here.

• The deadline for abstract submissions for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium is less than one month away (June 18, 2021). We are accepting submissions for posters, oral presentations and software demonstrations. For more information, including the submission template, please check out the Showcase homepage. There was also a brief presentation during last week’s community call about submitting your brief reports, which you can see here.

OHDSI Games Video

The May 18 OHDSI Community Call featured a presentation from six representatives (Kees van Bochove, Giorgio Gandaglia, Asieh Golozar, Bertrand de Meulder, Ariel Achtman, and Robert Snijder) from the PIONEER Prostate Cancer Study-A-Thon. They provided a full report on the five-day event and the ongoing work that came from it. This study-a-thon was a collaboration between PIONEER (European Network of Excellence for Big Data in Prostate Cancer), OHDSI and EHDEN.

Want to get involved in this important work moving forward? Here is contact information for the team leads, as well as for PIONEER/EHDEN/OHDSI.

Clinical characterization: Giorgio Gandaglia (giorgio.gandaglia@gmail.com)
Phenotyping: Asieh Golozar (golozar@ohdsi.org) and Shilpa Ratwani (shilpa@ohdsi.org)
Prediction: Ronald Herrera (ronald.herrera@bayer.com)
Data sources/study execution: Susan Evans Axelsson (susan.evans_axelsson@med.lu.se)
PIONEER: Carl Steinbeisser (carl@collaborate.eu) and Emma Jane Smith (e.smith@uroweb.org)
EHDEN: Nigel Hughes (nhughes@its.jnj.com)
OHDSI: Peter Rijnbeek (rijnbeek@ohdsi.org)

Updates

• Congratulations to Byungkon Kang, Jisang Yoon, Ha Young Kim, Sung Jin Jo, Yourim Lee, and Hye Jin Kam on the publication of Deep-learning-based automated terminology mapping in OMOP-CDM in JAMIA this past week.

• The OHDSI Center at the Roux Institute has a new webpage, where you can learn more about how the Center will benefit collaborators, and how you can become involved.

• The next APAC Community Call will be this week (Thursday/Wednesday, depending on your location), and the focus will be 10-minute tutorials. Xialin Wang will present WhiteRabbit and Rabbit-In-A-Hat, Seng Chan You will present Usagi, and Sathappan Selva Muthu Kumaran will present the Data Quality Dashboard. You can access these calls by using this link, or watch the recordings on our APAC homepage on OHDSI.org.

• The deadline for abstract submissions for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium is just over one month away (June 18, 2021). We are accepting submissions for posters, oral presentations and software demonstrations. For more information, including the submission template, please check out the Showcase homepage. There will also be a brief discussion on this prior to the presentation of the PIONEER Prostate Cancer Study-a-thon.

Slides

Introduction | PIONEER Presentation

Video Presentation

The May 11 OHDSI Community Call featured two debates surrounding our efforts to efficiently and reliably generate real-world evidence across multiple data sources.

Debate 1: It is more important to keep OHDSI standardized vocabularies up-to-date in content through a continuous release lifecycle than to align the OHDSI network on a common vocabulary version. (Debaters: Christian Reich and Peter Rijnbeek)

Debate 2: Observational studies are best conducted as a distributed network analysis and not a centralized data repository. (Debaters: Kristin Kostka and Andrew Williams) 

Updates

• Congratulations to Albert Prats-Uribe, Anthony Sena, Lana Yin Hui Lai, Waheed-Ul-Rahman Ahmed, Heba Alghoul, Osaid Alser, Thamir Alshammari , Carlos Areia, William Carter, Paula Casajust, Dalia Dawoud, Asieh Golozar, Jitendra Jonnagaddala, Paras Mehta, Mengchun Gong, Daniel R. Morales, Fredrik Nyberg, Jose Posada,  Martina Recalde, Elena Roel, Karishma Shah, Nigam Shah, Lisa Schilling, Vignesh Subbian, David Vizcaya, Lin Zhang, Ying Zhang, Hong Zhu, Li Liu, Jaehyeong Cho, Kristine Lynch, Michael Matheny, Seng Chan You, Peter Rijnbeek, George Hripcsak, Jennifer Lane, Edward Burn, Christian Reich, Marc Suchard, Talita Duarte-Salles, Kristin Kostka, Patrick Ryan, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra on this CHARYBDIS study posted: Characterizing Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection across Claims and Electronic Health Record Databases.

• Congratulations to the team of R P Vogelsang, R D Bojesen, E R Hoelmich, A Orhan, F Buzquurz, L Cai, C Grube, J A Zahid, E Allakhverdiiev, H H Raskov, I Drakos, N Derian, P B Ryan, P R Rijnbeek, I Gögenur for the study “Prediction of 90-day mortality after surgery for colorectal cancer using standardized nationwide quality-assurance data” published recently by BJS Open.

• Call for Collaboration: Seng Chan You is seeking collaborators to join in the following OHDSI Network Study: CEEAMOS (Comparative Estimation of the Effects of Anti-hypertensive Medications on the Occurrence of Schizophrenia). More information, as well as the link to the study package, is available on this forum post.

• The second seminar from the CBER Best Initiative Series, which featured Ben Goldstein’s discussion on “Understanding Informed Presence in Electronic Health Records Data,” was held last Wednesday. If you missed it, or want to watch it again, the recording is available here.

• EHDEN’s 4th open call for data partners will conclude this Thursday, May 13, at 17:00 CET. If you have any questions about the project, Jenny Lane provided a presentation that is now available on the EHDEN web site.

• We had a terrific APAC Community Call last week. Anton van der Vegt discussed the Australian real-world research infrastructure pilot, while Mui Van Zandt presented on OHDSI CDM 5.4 changes. Next week’s call is scheduled to focus on 10-minute tutorials, and all past recordings are available on our APAC homepage on OHDSI.org.

• We are just over one month away from the June 18 deadline for submissions for the 2021 Collaborator Showcase. We are accepting submissions for posters, oral presentations and software demos. We will share more information during the May 18 community call, or you can use this link to learn more.

• Arthur Goldberg announced that he has been invited to guest edit a Methods Collections for the vido journal JoVE (www.jove.com) and proposed a collection focused on “Methods and tools for international collaborations that mine electronic health records to better understand health and disease and thereby enable better healthcare.” If anybody is interested in contributing to this collection please contact him. His email is Arthur.Goldberg@mssm.edu.

Debate Recordings

Debate 1: It is more important to keep OHDSI standardized vocabularies up-to-date in content through a continuous release lifecycle than to align the OHDSI network on a common vocabulary version. (Debaters: Christian Reich and Peter Rijnbeek)

Debate 2: Observational studies are best conducted as a distributed network analysis and not a centralized data repository. (Debaters: Kristin Kostka and Andrew Williams)

The May 4 OHDSI Community Call was our third session dedicated to workgroup updates. Workgroup leads shared recent accomplishments, as well as key objectives for the future. The groups/presenters were GIS – Geographic Information System (Robert Miller); PEI – Pharmacovigilance Evidence Investigation (Erica Voss); UK Biobank/Registry (Maxim Moinat); and Electronic Health Records (Melanie Philofsky).

Updates

• Congratulations to Matthew Spotnitz, George Hripcsak, Patrick Ryan and Karthik Natarajan on this MedRxiv preprint: Characterizing Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection across Claims and Electronic Health Record Databases. Community feedback is appreciated.

• Congratulations to Kristin Kostka, who began her new position as the Director of the OHDSI Center at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University this week.

• Collaborator Evan Minty, a general internist and clinical assistant professor at the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary, Canada, was profiled in the latest edition of the OHDSI Collaborator Spotlight. Among the topics Evan discusses is a potential Surgery and Perioperative Medicine workgroup he would like to develop moving forward.

• The next APAC Community Call will be this week (Thursday/Wednesday, depending on your location), and the focus will be collaborator presentations. Dr. Anton van der Vegt will discuss the Australian real-world research infrastructure pilot, while Mui Van Zandt will present on OHDSI CDM 5.4 changes. You can access these calls by using this link, or watch the recordings on our APAC homepage.

• The May 2021 edition of The Journey, OHDSI’s official community newsletter, is now available. Learn more about how OHDSI enhanced its own foundation, while also learning about several global and local studies, the latest EHDEN data partner call, and plenty more. You can subscribe to The Journey here. 

• Erasmus MC recently shared a story about the latest EHDEN data call, which includes a €5 million budget available to health data experts wishing to standardize their databases. You can read that piece here.

• Our Janssen R&D Epidemiology friends are hiring two undergraduate or graduate level summer interns to assist with projects in the Observational Health Data Analytics (OHDA) team. A full description is available here, and the application deadline is May 7, 2021. If interested in this position, please send your CV with a brief description of your interest to Rupa Makadia (rmakadia@its.jnj.com).

Presentation Slides

Introduction | Geographic Information System | Pharmacovigilance Evidence Investigation | UK Biobank | Electronic Health Record

Presentation Recordings

GIS – Geographic Information System (Robert Miller, Tufts)

PEI – Pharmacovigilance Evidence Investigation (Erica Voss, Janssen R&D)

UK Biobank/Registry (Maxim Moinat, The Hyve)

Electronic Health Records (Melanie Philofsky, Odysseus
Data Services)

The April 27 OHDSI Community Call was our first Networking Session-themed call. Thank you to everybody who joined us in the GatherTown setting for great conversations, both around full tables or smaller one-on-one settings. We look forward to doing this again on a future community call.

Updates

• Congratulations to Yingcheng Sun, Alex Butler, Latoya Stewart, Hao Liu, Chi Yuan, Christopher Southard, Jae Hyun Kim, and Chunhua Weng on the recent study “Building An OMOP Common Data Model-Compliant Annotated Corpus for COVID-19 Clinical Trials,” which was published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

• Congratulations to George Hripcsak, Martijn Schuemie, David Madigan, Patrick Ryan and Marc Suchard on the recent study “Drawing Reproducible Conclusions from Observational Clinical Data with OHDSI,” which was published in the Yearbook of Medical Informatics.

• HADES (Health Analytics Data-to-Evidence Suite) was featured in a recent OHDSI article after achieving more than 200,000 downloads on CRAM. This set of 20 open-source R packages is foundational to OHDSI’s mission, but it is being maintained by a small core within the community. Please learn more about HADES, and see how greater community support — in a variety of ways — can ensure future success for our open-source toolset.

• The April 22 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Community Call featured updates from the six regional chapters (Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan). Mui Van Zandt provided a brief overview of those updates during this call (see slides and video below). 

• This Week in OHDSI is a new feature on OHDSI.org that shares weekly updates, publications, presentations from the community call, and more. It will be updated each Wednesday.

• The UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) has a vacancy for an OMOP expert / health database researcher. CPRD has converted the CPRD Aurum primary care electronic health record (EHR) database into an OMOP CDM version and are seeking an individual with expertise in using the OMOP CDM and strong technical skills to support ongoing validation work. The successful candidate will also train users within CPRD in the use of the OHDSI analytical infrastructure. The position will be hosted within the Observational Research team, but will require close collaboration with the Health Data Science team who manage the technical implementation. For more information and a detailed vacancy specification please contact: Darren Lunn, Head of Health Data Science, CPRD (darren.lunn@mhra.gov.uk).

Presentation Slides

Introduction | APAC Update

Presentation Recordings

Asia-Pacific Regional Updates

The April 20 OHDSI Community Call focused on “Local Impacts of OHDSI.” While there are several global network studies ongoing in OHDSI, there are also important impacts happening within local institutions as well, either through the adoption of the OMOP CDM and/or use of OHDSI tools. Alison Callahan and Jose Posada (Stanford University), Lisa Schilling (University of Colorado Denver), and Karthik Natarajan (Columbia University) shared some recent success stories for our community.

Updates

• George Hripcsak shared a presentation on “Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics, Interoperability, and Research” with the ONC Interoperability Standards Priorities Task Force last Friday. Community feedback prior to the presentation was appreciated. You can access George’s slides from the presentation here. 

• The call for participation for the 2021 OHDSI Global Symposium Collaborator Showcase has officially opened. All submissions are due no later than 8 pm (EST) on Friday, June 18, 2021. We will have more information during future community calls to assist in this topic.

• EHDEN has launched its fourth open call for European Data Partners, which runs until May 13, 2021. The first three calls combined to welcome 61 data partners across Europe into the EHDEN collaboration. This is a general call across therapeutic areas and diverse types of health data. EHDEN welcomes all applications, but applications from countries not yet (or minimally) represented in the EHDEN Network will be especially welcome.

• EHDEN just closed its third call for small-to-medium enterprises to conduct mapping for the network of data partners. While there is still work to be done, the EHDEN leadership was excited about this recent session and how it can build on the current foundation of 26 SMEs working within EHDEN. Congrats to both the EHDEN team and all the SMEs who took part in the call.

• Congratulations to the EHDEN Academy leadership team, as the online learning platform recently reached the 1000-student milestone. You can access the EHDEN Academy here.

• Congratulations to Kristin Kostka, who was honored over the weekend with a Top 10 Under 10 Alumni Award by her alma mater, Elon University.

• The first meeting of the Education Workgroup will be held Friday, April 23, at 8 am ET. There isn’t a meeting link yet, but please check either the Education Workgroup on Teams or the Working Group Calls page on OHDSI.org for updates this week.

• The Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Columbia University is looking to hire two Clinical Research Data Analysts. The successful candidates will be responsible for curating EHR data from a network of health provider organizations across the country. The candidates will work with Karthik Natarajan, who will present at Tuesday’s community call, and his Research Operations team. The team is looking for data analysts with strong SQL and Python skills, as well as effective interpersonal skills and a passion for advancing large scale observational research. For more details, and to apply, please check out the following links:

Post #1 https://opportunities.columbia.edu/en-us/job/508179/clinical-research-data-analyst
Post #2 https://opportunities.columbia.edu/en-us/job/510633/clinical-research-data-analyst

• Monica Arrue posted an opportunity to join the IOMED data engineering team. IOMED’s products consist of an integrated suite of tools that dramatically simplify the process of clinical research, by structuring clinical data and providing unified and standardized access to it. The core of your role will be designing, implementing, and testing data extraction and transformation tools on a micro services environment. as well as to collaborate in the development and maintenance of the main products of the company: data processing pipelines, data model transformations, and components of a multi-modal distributed database. More information and a contact email is available on this forum post.

Presentation Slides

Introduction | Callahan/Posada | Schilling | Natarajan

Presentation Recordings

Stanford University (Alison Callahan/Jose Posada)

University of Colorado-Denver (Lisa Schilling)

Columbia University (Karthik Natarajan)

The April 13 OHDSI Community Call provided tutorials on four open-source tools that can aid observational research. The four presentations are available below.

Updates 

• Registration for the 2021 Global OHDSI Symposium is now open. More information, as well as a direct registration link, are now available on OHDSI.org. Registration remains free for the four-day event, which takes place Sept. 12-15. All OHDSI activities depend largely on government grants and organization sponsorships; please email symposium@ohdsi.org if you would like to consider sponsorship opportunities for this year’s symposium.

• Last week, Patrick Ryan asked for feedback from the FDA/CBER draft master protocol for their COVID-19 vaccine safety surveillance efforts, and the community responded. There is another opportunity to voice your thoughts, as the FDA/CBER draft protocol for “Assessment of the Performance of COVID-19 Diagnosis Code Using SARS-CoV-2 Test Results” was recently posted. This could be of particular interest to many of you who are interested in phenotype evaluation or have been developing COVID-related phenotypes. You can respond to the forum post.

• George Hripcsak also shared a forum post about a presentation he will provide about ‘OHDSI and Interoperability’ to the ONC Interoperability Standards Priorities Task Force this Friday. George asked for feedback on thoughts we should share as a community in this area. We’ve already received some detailed feedback on this topic, but there is still time to share your thoughts. The full forum thread is available here.

• Last week’s community call was all about ongoing network studies, but what happens if you have an idea for a new study, but don’t know how to get started. Sarah Seager and Ian Wong are leading an IQVIA webinar about how to design and execute observational network studies this Thursday at 10 am ET? You can register for the webinar here.

• Sonia Araujo will present the work of the OHDSI Clinical Trials WG during the CDISC 2021 Europe Interchange. The presentation “Expanding the OMOP Observational Data Standard to Capture Clinical Trial Data” will take place April 28 at 16:30 CET/10:30 EDT. You can register for the event here.

Video Tutorials

ATHENA/Vocabulary (Michael Kallfelz)

Creating Cohort Definitions in ATLAS (Asieh Golozar)

ACHILLES (Frank DeFalco)

USAGI (Maxim Moinat)

The April 6 OHDSI Community Call focused on OHDSI Studies. Leads from six different network studies provided presentations on work happening around the community. Videos/slides from all presentations are available below.

Updates and Shoutouts 

• Congratulations to the team of Jimyung Park, Seng Chan You, Eugene Jeong, Chunhua Weng, Dongsu Park, Jin Roh, Dong Yun Lee, Jae Youn Cheong, Jin Wook Choi, Mira Kang, and Rae Woong Park for this recent study in JMIR Informatics: A Framework (SOCRATex) for Hierarchical Annotation of Unstructured Electronic Health Records and Integration Into a Standardized Medical Database: Development and Usability Study.

• Congratulations to the team of Hao Liu, Yuan Chi, Alex Butler, Yingcheng Sun, Chunhua Weng for this study published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics: A Knowledge Base of Clinical Trial Eligibility Criteria.

• Congratulations to Clair Blacketer, Frank DeFalco, Patrick Ryan and Peter Rijnbeek on this recent preprint posted to MedRxiv: Increasing Trust in Real-World Evidence Through Evaluation of Observational Data Quality. Community feedback is appreciated.

• Patrick Ryan shared this forum post asking for community feedback on the recent FDA/CBER draft master protocol for their COVID-19 vaccine safety surveillance efforts. Leaders of our OHDSI team working with the FDA will collate responses and provide a collective response from the community. Please share all feedback by midnight Wednesday, as public response is due Thursday. You can post to the thread, or in the EUMAEUS channel within the PLE/PLP team.

• The next OHDSI APAC Community Call will be this week and will focus on OMOP Projects. Scheduled presenters will be Yuan Lu (Comprehensive comparative effectiveness and safety of second-line antihypertensive agents: Utilizing the LEGEND principles to mobilize collaboration across the OHDSI APAC network) and Namki Hong (Development of Common Data Model for Rare Endocrine Diseases (REDCDM) platform). More information is available on our OHDSI APAC webpage.

• The April edition of “The Journey” newsletter was posted last week, and links to all of the papers and preprints discussed on the community calls over the last month, as well as updates on OHDSI work with the FDA, the new collaboration with HL7, advances in patient-level prediction, and much more.

Slides 

Introduction | You | Lane | Torre | Nishimura | Li | Schuemie

Video Presentation

2:10 – Cancer Risk Between H2 Blockers (Seng Chan You)

7:33 – MSKAI- Musculoskeletal adverse events following hormonal treatment for breast cancer: Cohort Diagnostics to establish feasibility (Jenny Lane)

14:15 – Covid-19 pandEmic impacts on mental health Related conditions Via multi-database nEtwork: a LongitutinaL Observational (CERVELLO) study (Carmen Olga-Torre)

19:33 – Alpha-1 blocker for Palliating Inflammatory injury Severity (APIS) study (Aki Nishimura)

25:33 – Calculating the background rates of adverse events of special interest (AESI) for the COVID vaccines (Xintong Li)

33:11 – EUMAEUS – Evaluating Use of Methods for Adverse Event Under Surveillance (Martijn Schuemie)

The March 30 OHDSI Community Call focused on Data Visualizations. After a brief discussion about the impact of data visualizations in science, members of the community shared their own submissions to the March 2021 Challenge, which asked people to share one visualization that used OHDSI tools/data/results to tell a compelling story that touched on the COVID pandemic. 

Updates and Shoutouts

• Congratulations to the team of Xintong Li, Anna Ostropolets, Rupa Makadia, Azza Shaoibi, Gowtham Rao, Anthony Sena, Eugenia Martinez-Hernandez, Antonella Delmestri, Katia Verhamme, Peter Rijnbeek, Talita Duarte-Salles, Marc Suchard, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, and Daniel Prieto-Alhambra for the first preprint coming out of our work on vaccine surveillance: Characterizing the incidence of adverse events of special interest for COVID-19 vaccines across eight countries: a multinational network cohort study. This preprint has been posted to MedRxiv, and community feedback is both welcomed and encouraged.

• Congratulations to the team of Seng Chan You, Harlan Krumholz, Marc Suchard, Martijn Schuemie, George Hripcsak, RuiJun Chen, Steven Shea, Jon Duke, Nicole Pratt, Christian Reich, David Madigan, Patrick Ryan, Rae Woong Park, and Sungha Park for this study published in Hypertension: Comprehensive Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of First-Line β-Blocker Monotherapy in Hypertensive Patients. 

• Congratulations to the team of Sara Khalid, Cynthia Yang, Clair Blacketer, Talita Duarte-Salles, Sergio Fernandez-Bertolin, Chungsoo Kim, Rae Woong Park, Jimyung Park, Martijn Schuemie, Anthony Sena, Marc Suchard, Seng Chan You, Peter Rijnbeek, and Jenna Reps for this preprint recently posted on MedRxiv: A standardized analytics pipeline for reliable and rapid development and validation of prediction models using observational health data.

• Congratulations to the team of Akihiko Nishimura, Junqing Xie, Kristin Kostka, Talita Duarte-Salles, Sergio Fernández Bertolín, María Aragón, Clair Blacketer, Azza Shoaibi, Scott DuVall, Kristine Lynch, Michael Matheny, Thomas Falconer, Daniel Morales, Mitchell Conover, Seng Chan You, Nicole Pratt, James Weaver, Anthony Sena, Martijn Schuemie, Jenna Reps, Christian Reich, Peter Rijnbeek, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, and Marc Suchard for this recent preprint posted on MedRxiv: Alpha-1 blockers and susceptibility to COVID-19 in benign prostate hyperplasia patients: an international cohort study.

Slides 

Introduction + Data Visualizations

Video Presentation

The March 23 OHDSI Community Call focused on for a presentation on OHDSI’s work with the FDA BEST program to support its mission to conduct safety and effectiveness surveillance of biologic products (vaccines, blood and blood products, tissues and advanced therapeutics). 

Updates and Shoutouts

• Congratulations to Eng Hooi Tan, Anthony Sena, Albert Prats-Uribe, Seng Chan You, Waheed-Ul-Rahman Ahmed, Kristin Kostka, Christian Reich, Scott Duvall, Kristine Lynch, Michael Matheny, Talita Duarte-Salles, Sergio Fernandez Bertolin, George Hripcsak, Karthik Natarajan, Thomas Falconer, Matthew Spotnitz, Anna Ostropolets, Clair Blacketer, Thamir Alshammari, Heba Alghoul, Osaid Alser, Jennifer Lane, Dalia Dawoud, Karishma Shah, Yue Yang, Lin Zhang, Carlos Areia, Asieh Golozar, Martina Recalde, Paula Casajust, Jitendra Jonnagaddala, Vignesh Subbian, David Vizcaya, Lana Lai, Fredrik Nyberg, Daniel Morales, Jose Posada, Nigam Shah, Mengchun Gong, Arani Vivekanantham, Aaron Abend, Evan Minty, Marc Suchard, Peter Rijnbeek, Patrick Ryan, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra on publication of this study in Rheumatology: COVID-19 in patients with autoimmune diseases: characteristics and outcomes in a multinational network of cohorts across three countries.

• Congratulations to Torunn Elise Sivesind, Taylor Runion, Megan Branda, Lisa Schilling, and Robert Dellavalle on this study published in Dermatology: Dermatologic Research Potential of the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Network. 

• The next APAC Community Call will be this week (Thursday/Wednesday depending on time zone). The focus will be ODHSI APAC Network Research, and there are two exciting presentations scheduled to be shared. Assistant Professor will present on “Comprehensive comparative effectiveness and safety of second-line antihypertensive agents: Utilizing the LEGEND principles to mobilize collaboration across the OHDSI APAC network”, while Dr. Feng Lei will present “Treatment Patterns and Risk of Switch to Mania in Bipolar Depressive Patients Treated with Antidepressants: A real world study using the OHDSI Network.”

These calls are hosted in the OHDSI APAC environment in Teams. You can join the call using this link. If you don’t have access to the OHDSI APAC environment, please fill out this form. If you can’t make the call, all recordings will be added to the OHDSI APAC page.

• The first session of the CBER BEST Initiative Seminar Series , hosted by Northeastern University, will be held Wednesday, March 24, at 11 am ET. Dr. Daniel Salmon, a member of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, will present “ Vaccine Safety Surveillance Systems for Routine and Pandemic Immunization Programs.”

This a free event and open to anybody. Register: https://northeastern.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Sa3_Um_ISrm-lamtSUWfLA.

• In preparation for the potential release of CDM Version 5.4 later this year, the Common Data Model workgroup has scheduled a special two-hour planning session to be held Tuesday, March 30, at 1 pm in the CDM Teams environment. Clair Blacketer has shared a proposed list of changes that is posted in the General CDM thread. Please join for some or all of the meeting if you are interested in helping shape the next update of the OMOP CDM.

• The deadline for the OHDSI March Visualization Challenge is this Thursday, March 25, at 8 pm ET, and we already have some terrific entries. Please check out the channel within the general OHDSI page for full instructions. During next week’s community call, we are excited to highlight these visualizations that use OHDSI tools/data/results to tell the most compelling stories touching on the COVID pandemic. We want to hear from as many members of our community as possible!

Slides 

FDA Best Collaboration | Introduction

Video Presentation

The March 16 OHDSI Community Call featured presentations from Jenna Reps, Henrik John and Ross Williams on ‘Advances in Patient-Level Prediction.’

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

• Congratulations to Alison Callahan, Vladimir Polony, José Posada, Juan Banda, Saurabh Gombar, and Nigam Shah on publication of the study “ACE: the Advanced Cohort Engine for searching longitudinal patient records” in JAMIA.

• Congratulations to Jungchan Park, Seung-Hwa Lee, Seng Chan You, Jinseob Kim, Kwangmo Yang on this study published in PLOS ONE: “Effect of renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitors on Covid-19 patients in Korea.”

• Two leaders in the OHDSI community recently achieved professional milestones. Hua Xu, who leads our NLP and China workgroups, was recently named Associate Dean for Innovation at UTHealth, while Seng Chan You, a leader in our Asia-Pacific community, recently started a new position as Research Assistant Professor in Severance Hospital in Seoul, South Korea. Congratulations to both Hua and Chan!

• Chan announced that the Yonsei University Hospital System will join OHDSI as an active collaborator as part of the most recent OHDSI collaborator spotlight. In this Q&A, Chan also discusses his new role, OHDSI’s growth in the Asia-Pacific region, leading the COVID-19 data sharing efforts, and plenty more.

• The OHDSI APAC webpage is now live: https://www.ohdsi.org/apac/. This page will include recordings from all APAC community calls, which are held bi-weekly on Wednesday at 10 pm ET. It also includes information about upcoming calls, the different APAC regional chapters, how to engage with the APAC community, and more.

• The Pioneer/EHDEN/OHDSI prostate cancer study-a-thon was a terrific success last week, with more than 200 participants joining the important effort. We look forward to having representatives from the study-a-thon present on the research and findings in a future community call!

• Two potential OHDSI workgroups were proposed in recent forum posts. Nigel Hughes proposed an OHDSI Education Workgroup, while  Faaizah Arhsad proposed an Early-Stage Researcher Workgroup. Please take a look at these posts and provide feedback if you are interested!

• EHDEN opened its third open call for SMEs to apply for training and certification to convert health data from various forms to the OMOP common data model. This call will run from March 15 through April 12. EHDEN currently has 26 SMEs to support mapping and sustainability for a network currently including 60 data partners (there will be two more data partner calls in 2021). Check out this recent update on EHDEN, which came from a February community call presentation.

• The OHDSI March Visualization Challenge is underway, and we already have a handful of entries. Please check out the channel within the general OHDSI page for full instructions, and to see a few of the early posts that highlight a visualization using OHDSI tools/data/results that tells the most compelling story touching on the COVID pandemic.

Save The Dates

The 2021 OHDSI Symposium will be Sept. 12-15, with the main symposium taking place Monday, Sept. 13. We don’t know if this will be in-person, hybrid or completely virtual, so there are more details to come, but please save these dates.

Presentation Slides

Introduction • Reps • Williams

Recordings

Best Practices for Prediction Using Observational Data (Jenna Reps)

External Validation of Existing Dementia Prediction Models on Observational Health Data (Henrik John)

Reducing Risk of Reproducing Research Wrong: Creation of a Patient-Level Prediction Model Library (Ross Williams)

The March 9 OHDSI Community Call featured workgroup updates from leaders within the Oncology, Psychiatry, NLP and Medical Devices teams.

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

• Congratulations to Jenna Reps, Chungsoo Kim, Ross Williams, Aniek Markus, Cynthia Yang, Talita Duarte-Salles, Thomas Falconer, Jitendra Jonnagaddala, Andrew Williams, Sergio Fernández-Bertolín, Scott DuVall, Kristin Kostka, Gowtham Rao, Azza Shoaibi, Anna Ostropolets, Matthew Spotnitz, Lin Zhang, Paula Casajust, Ewout Steyerberg, Fredrik Nyberg, Benjamin Skov Kaas-Hansen, Young Hwa Choi, Daniel Morales, Siaw-Teng Liaw, Maria Tereza Fernandes Abrahão, Carlos Areia, Michael E Matheny, María Aragón, Rae Woong Park, George Hripcsak, Christian Reich, Marc Suchard, Seng Chan You, Patrick Ryan, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, and Peter Rijnbeek on this paper published by JBIR Medical Informatics: Can we trust the prediction model? Illustrating the importance of external validation by implementing the COVID-19 Vulnerability (C-19) Index across an international network of observational healthcare datasets.

• Congratulations to Jingqi Wang, Noor Abu-el-Rub, Josh Gray, Huy Anh Pham, Yujia Zhou, Frank Manion, Mei Liu, Xing Song, Hua Xu, Masoud Rouhizadeh, and Yaoyun Zhang on this recent JAMIA study: COVID-19 SignSym: a fast adaptation of a general clinical NLP tool to identify and normalize COVID-19 signs and symptoms to OMOP common data model.

• The Prostate Cancer Study-A-Thon started Monday with more than 200 registered participants. It has been a collaborative effort between PIONEER, EHDEN and the OHDSI community. You can learn more about this important effort, which will take place through Friday.

• Our third OHDSI APAC Community Call will be this week (Wednesday at 10 pm ET), and it will feature a pair of community presentations from the 2020 APAC Symposium. Ty Stanford will present his work on “Mapping to standardised vocabularies: a process for medicine codes in Australia,” while Jason Hsu and Alex Nguyen will present “Introduction of Taipei Medical University Clinical Research Database; TMUCDR – OHDSI CDM Mapping Progress.”

These calls have been moved to our Teams environment and are available within the OHDSI APAC team. If you don’t currently have access to this team, you can request it here. You can also use this direct link to the call.

• Patrick Ryan shared a call for participation in the Vaccine AESI Characterization study. The package was recently revised to reflect changes made by the FDA, and revisions have been posted to the Github. Thank you to all the data partners who have already participated, and those who haven’t can connect with Patrick Ryan.

Save The Dates

The 2021 OHDSI Symposium will be Sept. 12-15, with the main symposium taking place Monday, Sept. 13. We don’t know if this will be in-person, hybrid or completely virtual, so there are more details to come, but please save these dates.

Presentation Slides

Introduction • Psychiatry WG • Medical Devices WG • Oncology WG

Recordings

Oncology WG (Shilpa Ratwani) 

https://youtu.be/ZpzTZyaZRSs

Psychology WG (Dmitry Dymshyts)

Natural Language Processing WG (Hua Xu)

Medical Devices WG (Asiyah Lin)

The March 2 OHDSI Community Call featured breakout sessions on some important tools/processes for collaborative research: ETL, ATLAS and HADES.

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

OHDSI and HL7 recently announced a collaboration to address the sharing and tracking of data in the healthcare and research industries by creating a single common data model. The organizations will integrate HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) and OHDSI’s OMOP common data model to achieve this goal. Read more about this here.

Congratulations to Ed Burn, Anthony Sena, Kristin Kostka, Talita Duarte-Salles, Dani Prieto-Alhambra and the full team (42 authors!) on this February MedRxiv preprint coming from our #OHDSICOVID19 work in CHARYBDIS: Use of dialysis, tracheostomy, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation among 842,928 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States. Community feedback is appreciated for these preprints.

Congratulations to Kristin Kostka, Talita Duarte-Salles, Albert Prats-Uribe, Anthony Sena, and the entire team for submitting the manuscript about the overall CHARYBDIS study for peer review. The study is now available as a preprint via Research Square.

The upcoming PIONEER/EHDEN/OHDSI study-a-thon to study the natural history of prostate cancer starts in less than one week. You can register for the event, scheduled for March 8-12, by clicking here.

Save The Dates

The 2021 OHDSI Symposium will be Sept. 12-15, with the main symposium taking place Monday, Sept. 13. We don’t know if this will be in-person, hybrid or completely virtual, so there are more details to come, but please save these dates.

Presentation Slides

Introduction

Recordings

ATLAS Breakout (Facilitators: Greg Klebanov and Anthony Sena)

ETL Breakout (Facilitators: Clair Blacketer and Melanie Philofsky)

HADES Breakout (Facilitators: Adam Black and Marc Suchard)

https://youtu.be/_VXBKdzjEk8

The Feb. 23 OHDSI Community Call focused on research updates within the OHDSI community (CHARYBDIS, SCYLLA and Vaccine AESI Incidence Characterization).

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

Congratulations to some of our Stanford collaborators, including Nigam Shah, Alison Callahan and Jose Posada, for their work on using OHDSI infrastructure to inform COVID care guidelines at Stanford Health Care. These efforts were featured in a recent video news feature by NBC Bay Area.

The new Asia-Pacific (APAC) community calls, which are held every other week on Wednesdays at 10 pm ET, have been moved to the MS Teams environment. The next call will be this Wednesday, Feb. 24, and you can find the link in the OHDSI APAC team, or use this link to join the call.

We are close to submitting the manuscript for our CHARYBDIS 1.0 paper. All COI forms are due this Wednesday, while we are hoping to have data partner approvals/signoffs by Friday (please let Kristin Kostka know if you need more time for this). Please check your emails from around Feb. 11 if you think this could refer to you. More information is in the Study – CHARYBDIS 2.0 Team.

David Madigan recently posted this opening for Director, OHDSI Center at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University. This is an exciting opportunity to take a leadership role in this new initiative within the OHDSI community.

The PIONEER Study-A-Thon to explore the natural history of prostate cancer in a large dataset of patients from across the globe will be held March 8-12. You can register for the study-a-thon here.

Drug Safety invites the submission of original research articles (up to 6000 words) on the Role of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in Pharmacovigilance for a themed issue of the journal to be published in 2021. Please submit an abstract describing your proposed paper by April 30 to nitin.joshi@springer.com. Full papers will be invited by May 30 and manuscripts due by August 31. More information is available here.

Save The Dates

The 2021 OHDSI Symposium will be Sept. 12-15, with the main symposium taking place Monday, Sept. 13. We don’t know if this will be in-person, hybrid or completely virtual, so there are more details to come, but please save these dates.

Presentation Slides

Introduction • CHARYBDIS • SCYLLA • Vaccine AESI Study

Recordings 

CHARYBDIS (Natural Disease History of COVID-19) • Kristin Kostka

SCYLLA (Comparative Safety and Effectiveness of Treatments under Evaluation for COVID-19) • Dani Prieto-Alhambra

Vaccine Adverse Events of Special Interest Characterization Study • George Hripcsak

The Feb. 16 OHDSI Community Call focused on the European Health Data & Evidence Network. Topics of focus in the main presentation include: the rationale for the EHDEN project, interaction with OHDSI, overview of the EHDEN project, detail on progress made, objectives for year 3, EHDEN Academy, and EHDEN Sustainability

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

Recordings 

EHDEN Overview (Peter Rijnbeek & Nigel Hughes)

The Feb. 9 OHDSI Community Call focused on getting newcomers started on their own OHDSI journey. The various presentations and slides are available below.

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

Congratulations to the team of Edward Burn, Cristian Tebé, Sergio Fernandez-Bertolin, Maria Aragon, Martina Recalde, Elena Roel, Albert Prats-Uribe, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra & Talita Duarte-Salles for this study: The natural history of symptomatic COVID-19 during the first wave in Catalonia, published in Nature Communications.

Congratulations also goes out to the team of Jenna Reps, Peter Rijnbeek, Alana Cuthbert, Patrick Ryan, Nicole Pratt and Martijn Schuemie for this study: An empirical analysis of dealing with patients who are lost to follow‑up when developing prognostic models using a cohort design, published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

Finally, we’re happy to recognize the work of Vaclav Papez, Maxim Moinat, Stefan Payralbe, Folkert W Asselbergs, R Thomas Lumbers, Harry Hemingway, and Richard Dobson, Spiros Denaxas for this recent study: Transforming and evaluating electronic health record disease phenotyping algorithms using the OMOP common data model: a case study in heart failure, published in JAMIA Open.

Gowtham Rao shared this forum post asking for feedback from a recent brainstorming session for the OHDSI Phenotype Library group. He discussed it a bit during the call, but there is a link to provide feedback on the post.

Please be aware of these two upcoming deadlines:

Deadline for abstracts for ICPE 2021 is THIS FRIDAY, February 12, while scholarship applications are accepted until March 1. More information is available here.

Drug Safety invites the submission of original research articles (up to 6000 words) on the Role of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in Pharmacovigilance for a themed issue of the journal to be published in 2021. Please submit an abstract describing your proposed paper by April 30 to nitin.joshi@springer.com. Full papers will be invited by May 30 and manuscripts due by August 31. More information is available here.

Want to get started in our Microsoft Teams environment? Fill out this form to get access to OHDSI teams, and then let us know which workgroups, studies and/or chapters that interest you!

SAVE THE DATES

The 2021 OHDSI Symposium will be Sept. 12-15, with the main symposium taking place Monday, Sept. 13. We don’t know if this will be in-person, hybrid or completely virtual, so there are more details to come, but please save these dates.

Presentation Slides

Introduction • OHDSI Overview (PDF) (PPT)

Recordings 

OHDSI Overview (Patrick Ryan)

How To Get Started/OHDSI.org Tour (Craig Sachson)

OHDSI Microsoft Teams Tour (Patrick Ryan)

Panel Comments (Sarah Seager, Greg Klebanov, Mui Van Zandt, Andrew Williams), Q&A Session, Next Steps 

https://youtu.be/-fIrlNQIYaM

The Feb. 2 OHDSI Community Call featured presentations by Christopher Knoll and Martin Lavallee on “Open-Source Tools For Cohort Definition.” Videos of both presentations will be posted below.

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Christian Maier, Lorenz A. Kapsner, Sebastian Mate, Hans-Ulrich Prokosch, and Stefan Kraus for this study: Patient Cohort Identification on Time Series Data Using the OMOP Common Data Model, published in Applied Clinical Informatics.

• Two upcoming studies were discussed briefly prior to our main presentations. Kees van Bochove discussed the upcoming PIONEER/EHDEN/OHDSI study-a-thon to study the natural history of prostate cancer. You can register for the event, scheduled for March 8-12, by clicking here.

• Patrick Ryan introduced the new Covid-19 Vaccine AESI Incidence Characterization Study.

• Sarah Seager recently posted a job opening for an OMOP Data Scientist at IQVIA. Check out the full job description (and application link) here.

• Both Christian Reich and Dani Prieto-Alhambra will present a talk entitled “Global Collaboration: COVID-19 research in open data networks” this Thursday at 11 am ET through IQVIA. You can register for this talk here.

• Deadline for abstracts for ICPE 2021 is February 12, while scholarship applications are accepted until March 1. More information is available here.

• Drug Safety invites the submission of original research articles (up to 6000 words) on the Role of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in Pharmacovigilance for a themed issue of the journal to be published in 2021. Please submit an abstract describing your proposed paper by April 30 to nitin.joshi@springer.com. Full papers will be invited by May 30 and manuscripts due by August 31. More information is available here.

Next Week

• Our focus next week will be on helping newcomers start their journey. We want to include a Q&A session that answers some of the most pressing questions for our newest collaborators. You can help by submitting questions and up-voting others here.

Presentations

The Jan. 26 OHDSI Community Call featured updates from four working groups: Common Data Model, Data Quality, Patient-Level Prediction/Population Level Estimation, and HADES. All four presentation recordings are posted below. 

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

Congratulations to Martijn Schuemie, lead author of this recent study “Quantifying bias in epidemiologic studies evaluating the association between acetaminophen use and cancer ” in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.

Also, congratulations to both Kristin Kostka and Andrew Williams, co-authors on the “The National COVID Cohort Collaborative: Clinical Characterization and Early Severity Prediction” preprint in MedRxiv. N3C uses the OMOP CDM to standardize the largest COVID-19 cohort in the United States.

A new OHDSI Asia-Pacific (APAC) Community Call will be held every two weeks, starting Wednesday, Jan. 27th at 10 PM EST (Jan 28th at noon Korean Standard Time). Current information is available here, but look for more updates about a new APAC channel on the Teams environment.

Both Christian Reich and Dani Prieto-Alhambra will present a talk entitled “Global Collaboration: COVID-19 research in open data networks” on Feb. 4 at 11 am ET through IQVIA. You can register for this talk here.

Deadline for abstracts for ICPE 2021 is February 12, while scholarship applications are accepted until March 1. More information is available here.

Drug Safety invites the submission of original research articles (up to 6000 words) on the Role of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in Pharmacovigilance for a themed issue of the journal to be published in 2021. Please submit an abstract describing your proposed paper by April 30 to nitin.joshi@springer.com. Full papers will be invited by May 30 and manuscripts due by August 31. More information is available here.

CDM Workgroup Update (Christian Reich)

Data Quality Workgroup Update (Clair Blacketer)

PLP/PLE Workgroup Update (Marc Suchard)

HADES Workgroup Update (Martijn Schuemie)

The Jan. 19 OHDSI Community Call featured three breakout sessions, focused on: 1) Establishing conventions for expanded use cases of the OMOP CDM (moderated by Sonia Araujo); 2) Methods research opportunities in patient-level predictions (moderated by Jenna Reps and Peter Rijnbeek); and 3) Phenotype development and evaluation (moderated by Juan Banda and Gowtham Rao). Videos of each breakout will be posted shortly. 

Shoutouts and updates from the week:

Congratulations to Elena Roel, Talita Duarte-Salles and the entire CHARYBDIS team on this latest preprint, Characteristics and outcomes of 118,155 COVID-19 individuals with a history of cancer in the United States and Spain. The team is seeking community feedback, so please read it and offer your insights.

Talita also authored a chapter on the SIDIAP database in this new book, Databases for Pharmacoepidemiological Research. Great work by our 2020 Titan Award recipient for Community Collaboration!

The EHDEN Consortium recently released a new tool, CdmInspection, an R Package to support quality control inspection of an OMOP-CDM instance. Congrats to everybody involved in this work!

The EHDEN Academy launched two new courses in late December, Population-Level Effect Estimation and Patient-Level Prediction. Learn more about the EHDEN Academy here, or join us for our Feb. 16 call, which will be focused on the EHDEN Consortium.

If you want to become more involved in EHDEN work (or you know somebody who could be interested), there is a software developer position open on Peter Rijnbeek’s team. Learn more about the position and get the application link here. 

Breakout Session Videos

Establishing conventions for expanded use cases of the OMOP CDM (Moderator: Sonia Araujo)

Methods research opportunities in patient-level prediction (Moderators: Jenna Reps and Peter Rijnbeek)

Phenotype development and evaluation (Moderators: Juan Banda and Gowtham Rao)

The first OHDSI community call of 2021 was led by Patrick Ryan, who discussed setting objectives and key results in an effort to better align the community towards targeted goals in 2021. The full video presentation is below the shoutout links, while the associated slides are available here.

Shoutouts From This Week: Four papers associated with our community were highlighted in our new “Weekly Shoutouts.” They are below:

Common Problems, Common Data Model Solutions: Evidence Generation for Health Technology Assessment

Renin–angiotensin system blockers and susceptibility to COVID-19: an international, open science, cohort analysis

Risk of depression, suicide and psychosis with hydroxychloroquine treatment for rheumatoid arthritis: a multinational network cohort study

Extending the OMOP Common Data Model and Standardized Vocabularies to Support Observational Cancer Research

Also, George Hripcsak thanked the community for input on the FDA protocol and noted how appreciative the FDA was about our efforts, and Kees van Bochove shared about an upcoming effort to study the natural disease history of prostate cancer. Look for more information to come about that effort!