Our work benefits a range of individuals and organizations, including patients, providers, and researchers, as well as health care systems, industry, and government agencies. This benefit is achieved by improving both the quality of healthcare data analytics as well as the usefulness of healthcare data to these stakeholders.
Data Holders
There are many organizations that are trying to learn from observational health data:
- Health systems like hospitals and doctor’s offices have electronic health records that provide clinical care for their patients
- Insurance companies have claims data that can tell them about their beneficiaries
- Pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions conduct registries in which they are collecting non-interventional data
- Public health departments have community data
- Medical start-ups may have data collected from innovative applications
In our research community, we use the term data holder in a broad sense, referring to any organization that has data it would like to standardize, analyze, visualize, or in other ways benefit from the OHDSI framework and community. The key thing is that you’ve got (or are planning to create) a healthcare dataset and would like to get more value out of it.
We at OHDSI are serving all of these data holders by building tools and establishing processes to help standardize and analyze data in a higher quality and more efficient way.
If you are a data holder and are interested in collaborative research — and would like to participate in establishing and applying scientific best practices in your research — you are invited to join the OHDSI collaborative and conduct analyses on your own data or across the OHDSI data network.
Researchers
Researchers from many different disciplines — epidemiologists, statisticians, biomedical informaticists, computer scientists, and clinicians — are trying to generate evidence from observational health data. As a community, we still have a lot of work to do in order to generate such evidence in a fast and reliable manner. One of the biggest limiting steps is that many researchers do not have the opportunity to easily work together across disciplines. In addition, they may lack the funds or access to data to answer the questions that they are interested in.
We at OHDSI provide a forum for researchers to work together on problems of shared interest. We currently have over 140 researchers from across the globe who are connecting as part of an international network and sharing research ideas.
If you are a researcher interested in developing and evaluating new strategies for how to generate evidence from observational data, then consider this a warm invitation to join us at OHDSI.
Health Care Providers
Medical decision-making is difficult. Patients and providers alike are often challenged with trying to keep up with the latest information about all of the alternative treatments, and there is increasing pressure to learn from the real world experience of patients to inform best clinical practice.
We at OHDSI are working on a platform to generate real-world evidence that can be actionable both for health systems at a population level as well as individualized at the patient level.
Patients & Consumers
At some point in life we all become patients, and high-quality medical care is one of the most generic needs of mankind. Such care must be based on all the quantitative and hard evidence available about treatment options.
Today, not a lot of evidence is available to patients directly, and it is usually limited to describing the effects of treatments on a population. For example, we may be able to answer broad questions at a population level like, “Does Drug A cause bleeding?” What if we could address that question at the patient level: “What is the likelihood that Drug A will cause me to bleed?” based on available known factors like medical history and health behaviors?
There isn’t an established way to generate this kind of evidence reliably. So, we at OHDSI are looking to solve this problem and produce the individualized real-world evidence that any patient can use to get informed about his or her own medical situation.
