We fulfill OHDSI’s mission through building large-scale analysis of observational health databases for population-level estimation and patient-level predictions. We are deeply committed to our core principle that the products of our work – all of the tools we develop and all of the evidence we generate – should be made open-source and freely available to everyone.
Unfortunately, it costs money to make knowledge free, and financial support is necessary to sustain this effort. Some of us provide our time as in-kind contributions to the collaborative. Others are seeking support to facilitate their contributions to the collaborative through a variety of funding sources such as public government grants, industry contracts, private foundation grants and other opportunities.
Interested in providing support to OHDSI?
There are a few different ways you can provide funding to the OHDSI collaborative. Perhaps the most straightforward approach is to provide an unrestricted grant to the OHDSI central coordinating center at Columbia University. The money would go to providing the foundational support for the entire collaborative, and would be used to support personnel and shared infrastructure.
You can also directly fund a specific body of work under grant or contract with any of the OHDSI collaborating organizations. For example, if you are particularly interested in seeing the development of HOMER advanced, support could be used to fund programmers and other staff to get that application into production. In cases when the project requires collaboration between institutions, one institution could be the lead investigator group and coordinate subcontracts with other participating institutions. In terms of order of magnitude of support, the types of funding opportunities that the teams are actively soliciting usually involve direct costs paid per year with a 3-5 year commitment. The length of commitment is particularly important, as most projects involve an academic collaborator needing to make a sustained commitment to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or other research staff. The majority of the funding goes to direct cost associated with personnel, but money may also be allocated to technical infrastructure and licenses.
Another opportunity to contribute would be to fund the acquisition or licensing of a patient-level databases that can be placed within the OHDSI central coordinating center infrastructure and used for analysis. For example, you may have an interest in learning more about how to use a new de-identified EHR dataset that a commercial organization licenses to researchers. OHDSI could be a safe place to bring those data into a central environment. There, standardized analytics will help you understand what types of questions that data source can reliably address. Typically, a de-identified patient-level database would carry a license cost paid per year or over the course of a project, and that cost varies substantially by the data source. There would be additional resources needed to host the data and perform the data standardization necessary to learn from the data.
Again, an important point to reinforce is that, in all of these situations, you would have a direct contractual relationship with an OHDSI collaborating organization; there would be no third-party entity acting as middleman and taking a second-level of indirect overhead expenses from your contribution.
Reach out to any of the OHDSI collaborators or email contact@ohdsi.org and we will be happy to discuss next steps.
Acknowledgements
OHDSI collaborators would like to acknowledge and thank financial support provided by the following organizations:
- Vojtech Huser time spent on contributions to OHDSI is funded by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/ National Library of Medicine (NLM)/ Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC). In addition, Vojtech Huser access to datasets in the CDM model is sponsored by the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA project IMEDS-SA-0011
- The effort that Jon Duke contributes to OHDSI is supported by Janssen and Merck
- George Hripcsak’s team at OHDSI’s coordinating center, located at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics acknowledges support for contributions to OHDSI from Takeda Pharmaceuticals International, Janssen Research and Development and AstraZeneca.
- Contributions made to OHDSI by Rae Woong Park’s team at Ajou University School of Medicine is supported by a grant of the Korea Health Technology R&D Project through the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), funded by the Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (grant number : HI14C3201)
- Brian Sauer received investigator initiated research support from Amgen for his contributions to OHDSI
- Abraham Hartzema and Brian Sauer received consulting fees and travel expenses from Pfizer in connection with providing input on the study design and interpretation of results of the study “Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership and Mini-Sentinel Common Data Models and Analytics: a systematic data driven comparison.”
- The effort that Richard D. Boyce, PhD, contributes to OHDSI is funded by United States National Institute on Aging grant number K01AG044433 and the National Library of Medicine grant number R01LM011838-01.
- The effort that Chunhua Weng, PhD, contributes to OHDSI is funded by United States National Library of Medicine grant number R01LM009886 (“Bridging the semantic gap between clinical research eligibility criteria and clinical data”).
- Nigam Shah’s team at Stanford acknowledges support for contributions to OHDSI by a research award from Janssen Research and Development as well as National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant R01 GM101430 and the National Library of Medicine grant number R01 LM011369.
- The effort that Marc Suchard contributes to OHDSI is funded by NSF IIS1251151, NSF DMS126153 and NIH R01HG006139, along with support from Janssen Research and Development.
- The effort that Trevor Shaddox contributes to OHDSI is funded by NSF IIS1251151, NIH T32-GM008185, and by the UCLA Burroughs Wellcome Fund Inter-school Training Program in Chronic Diseases.
- Jon Duke acknowledges supporting sources for his contributions to OHDSI including funding from Janssen Research and Development, Merck & Co, and support from the Regenstrief Institute.
- Xiaochun Li acknowledges supporting sources for her contributions to OHDSI including funding from Janssen Research and Development, Merck & Co, and support from the Regenstrief Institute.
- The effort that George Hripcsak contributes to OHDSI is funded by the NIH’s National Library of Medicine grant number R01 LM006910 (“Discovering and applying knowledge in clinical databases”).
