Everybody is invited to the weekly OHDSI community call, which takes place each Tuesday at 11 am ET. These calls are meant to inform and engage our community through a variety of call formats, including community presentations, workgroup updates, breakout sessions, publication announcements, newcomer-focused sessions, and more. The upcoming schedule is available to the right.
Videos, slides and weekly updates from this year’s calls are available below. Presentations from the 2022 and 2021 community calls are also available.
The May 30 OHDSI Community Call provided a dedicated session on the 2023 Global Symposium collaborator showcase. After a brief discussion about the logistics of submitting your brief report, multiple sessions with small breakout groups were held to discuss submissions and brainstorm about ideas, challenges, and more.
The OHDSI 2023 Global Symposium collaborator showcase deadline is less than three weeks away. All brief reports must be submitted by 8 pm EST on Friday, June 16. More information on the collaborator showcase is available here, and you can use this link to submit your brief report.
• While tutorials for the SOS Challenge have concluded, work on the studies are ongoing. Cindy Cai, who is leading the Anti-VEGF study, announced that data partners are being accepted through July 14, 2023; her interpretation on the first study results is available here. Jack Janetzki, Seng Chan You and the fluoroquinolone also provided a results interpretation session last week, and they announced that weekly meetings would continue at their regular time through the end of July. All information and tutorials from the event are available on the SOS Challenge homepage.
• The OHDSI India chapter will be hosting its first webinar on “Redefine Indian healthcare with Real-world data and Real-world evidence” on June 14, 2023, from 3-4 pm IST. This webinar will share the latest progress within the RWD/RWE space in India and share how collaboration with the OHDSI India chapter can transform the healthcare management landscape in India. Nicole Pratt and Vikram Patil will be among the featured speakers. If you are interested, please visit the OHDSI India homepage to register.
• EHealth Hub For Cancer is funding 5 PhD students to work on cutting-edge cancer health data science research. These fully funded PhD studentships include a tax-free stipend (with fees paid) along with expenses, and 12-month travel to partner sites and materials are available. The program is being coordinated by Aedin Culhane in the School of Medicine, University of Limerick, Ireland, and the team is looking for students with a background in statistics, epidemiologists, bioinformatics, computational biology, software engineering or a related quantitative discipline. Please see this form for more details and application information; the deadline is 15 June 2023.
• The PIONEER team is leading a studyathon June 13-16 in Stockholm, Sweden, with a focus on “Observational health data analysis on the adverse events of systemic treatment in patients with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer” and is looking for participation from the OHDSI community, and specifically members of the Oncology WG. This will be a hybrid event so online participation is welcome. If you are interested in learning more, please fill out this form. PIONEER are especially looking for: collaborators with data on metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer already in the OMOP-CDM; experts with coding skills in R, SQL and Python; data analysts familiar with R and R Shiny; and epidemiologists with experience in phenotyping.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration is open, while the collaborator showcase submission deadline has passed.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration is open for this event. The call for participation deadline has passed. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage.
Job Postings
• Evan Phelps shared an opening at UC San Francisco for an experienced ETL Developer / Health Data Analyst on my Research Data Assets team at UCSF. While this position will not initially be focused solely on OMOP, we have a growing focus in that direction, and I’d love to see some applicants from the OHDSI community. This is a full-time, permanent position on a team that primarily works remotely, so relocation would not be required if you already live within the United States. More information is available on this post or on the application link.
• There is an opening with IQVIA for an OMOP Data Analyst. Job overview: Under broad guidance, performs data analytics activities related to complex business problems and issues to provide insight to decision makers. May provide analytic support for internal project teams and for external client consulting or services engagements. You can find the full posting and apply here.
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The May 23 OHDSI Community Call provided the ninth and final discussion for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on interpreting the results generated by our Anti-VEGF study, and the session was led by study lead Cindy Cai (Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins University).
Though this was the final session, the study itself will continue into the summer. As discussed during this session, data partners can join this study through July 14, 2023.
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.
Community Updates
• Congratulations to OHDSI veteran Thamir Alshammari on earning the distinction of being one of the 15 new ISPE fellows for 2023. The new Fellows will be officially inducted at the Annual Members’ Meeting & Awards Ceremony scheduled for Saturday, August 26th at the Halifax Convention Center, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
• Congratulations to the team of Tiffany Callahan, Adrianne Stefanski, Jordan Wyrwa, Chenjie Zeng, Anna Ostropolets, Juan Banda, William Baumgartner Jr., Richard Boyce, Elena Casiraghi, Ben Coleman, Janine Collins, Sara Deakyne Davies, James Feinstein, Asiyah Lin, Blake Martin, Nicolas Matentzoglu, Daniella Meeker, Justin Reese, Jessica Sinclair, Sanya Taneja, Katy Trinkley, Nicole Vasilevsky, Andrew Williams, Xingmin Zhang, Joshua Denny, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, Tellen Bennett, Melissa Haendel, Peter Robinson, Lawrence Hunter & Michael Kahn on the publication of Ontologizing health systems data at scale: making translational discovery a reality in NPJ Digital Medicine.
• EHealth Hub For Cancer is funding 5 PhD students to work on cutting-edge cancer health data science research. These fully funded PhD studentships include a tax-free stipend (with fees paid) along with expenses, and 12-month travel to partner sites and materials are available. The program is being coordinated by Aedin Culhane in the School of Medicine, University of Limerick, Ireland, and the team is looking for students with a background in statistics, epidemiologists, bioinformatics, computational biology, software engineering or a related quantitative discipline. Please see this form for more details and application information; the deadline is 15 June 2023.
• The PIONEER team is leading a studyathon June 13-16 in Stockholm, Sweden, with a focus on “Observational health data analysis on the adverse events of systemic treatment in patients with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer” and is looking for participation from the OHDSI community, and specifically members of the Oncology WG. This will be a hybrid event so online participation is welcome. If you are interested in learning more, please fill out this form. PIONEER are especially looking for: collaborators with data on metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer already in the OMOP-CDM; experts with coding skills in R, SQL and Python; data analysts familiar with R and R Shiny; and epidemiologists with experience in phenotyping.
• Martin Lavallee announced the release of Capr 2.0.3. This release includes a trio of patch changes, including the addition of an opAttribute super Class, a new version of purrr (v1.0.1) for list_flatten bug, and an update to github workflow versions.
• Frank DeFalco announced the release of Achilles 1.7.2. Achilles, which is not available on CRAN, has been brought in line with HADES package standards.
• Katy Sadowski announced that DataQualityDashboard 2.3.0 has been released; special thanks to Thomas White and Maxim Moinat for their efforts on this release. This release contains 2 new features:
New sqlOnly option that generates SQL queries which will insert DQ check results into a database table, and which can union check SQLs for improved performance
Function to convert the keys in a DQD results JSON file between snakecase and camelcase, addressing compatibility issues caused by the camelcase migration in v2.1.0
Thank you to all of our HADES developers and maintainers for all the work they do on our community open-source tools. You can follow all development announcements on this thread.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration is open, while the collaborator showcase submission deadline has passed.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration is open for this event. The call for participation deadline has passed. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage.
Job Postings
• Evan Phelps shared an opening at UC San Francisco for an experienced ETL Developer / Health Data Analyst on my Research Data Assets team at UCSF. While this position will not initially be focused solely on OMOP, we have a growing focus in that direction, and I’d love to see some applicants from the OHDSI community. This is a full-time, permanent position on a team that primarily works remotely, so relocation would not be required if you already live within the United States. More information is available on this post or on the application link.
• There is an opening with IQVIA for an OMOP Data Analyst. Job overview: Under broad guidance, performs data analytics activities related to complex business problems and issues to provide insight to decision makers. May provide analytic support for internal project teams and for external client consulting or services engagements. You can find the full posting and apply here.
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The May 16 OHDSI Community Call provided the eighth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on evidence synthesis, and the session will be led by:
Yong Chen (Professor of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, University of Pennsylvania)
Martijn Schuemie (Research Fellow, Epidemiology Analytics, Janssen Research and Development)
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.
• Congratulations to the team of Matthew Spotnitz, Nripendra Acharya, James Cimino, Shawn Murphy, Bahram Namjou, Nancy Crimmins, Theresa Walunas, Cong Liu, David Crosslin, Barbara Benoit, Elisabeth Rosenthal, Jennifer Pacheco, Anna Ostropolets, Harry Reyes Nieva, Jason Patterson, Lauren Richter, Tiffany Callahan, Ahmed Elhussein, Chao Pang, Krzysztof Kiryluk, Jordan Nestor, Atlas Khan, Sumit Mohan, Evan Minty, Wendy Chung, Wei-Qi Wei, Karthik Natarajan, and Chunhua Weng on the publication of A metadata framework for computational phenotypes in JAMIA Open.
• Thank you to Anna Ostropolets for sharing the final version of the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies Assessment last week. As part of the Vocabularies improvement process, the OHDSI Coordinating Center established a diverse committee that governs the Vocabularies maintenance and improvement activities (George Hripcsak, Patrick Ryan, Peter Rijnbeek, Rae Woong Park, Mui Van Zandt and Christian Reich).
• Fan Bu announced the release of EvidenceSynthesis 0.5.0. This release adds the functionality to perform Bayesian bias correction in causal estimation and sequential analysis using negative control outcomes. A new vignette showcasing the new functionality has been added too.
• Joel Swerdel announced the release of PheValuator 2.2.8, which allows for the use of a custom visit_occurrence table for systems with extremely large visit_occurrence tables and limited processing capability. Joel also posted a new PheValuator tutorial, which you can watch here.
• Martijn Schuemie announced that DatabaseConnector 6.2.1 has been released. The most important change is a minor change to the DESCRIPTION file that was required by CRAN.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration is open, while the collaborator showcase submission deadline has passed.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration is open for this event. The call for participation deadline has passed. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage.
Job Postings
• Evan Phelps shared an opening at UC San Francisco for an experienced ETL Developer / Health Data Analyst on my Research Data Assets team at UCSF. While this position will not initially be focused solely on OMOP, we have a growing focus in that direction, and I’d love to see some applicants from the OHDSI community. This is a full-time, permanent position on a team that primarily works remotely, so relocation would not be required if you already live within the United States. More information is available on this post or on the application link.
• There is an opening with IQVIA for an OMOP Data Analyst. Job overview: Under broad guidance, performs data analytics activities related to complex business problems and issues to provide insight to decision makers. May provide analytic support for internal project teams and for external client consulting or services engagements. You can find the full posting and apply here.
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The May 9 OHDSI Community Call provided the seventh tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on study diagnostics, and the session will be led by:
George Hripcsak (Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia Univ.)
Fan Bu (Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA // Incoming Assistant Professor, Univ. of Michigan)
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage. The video from the tutorial is posted below, and the slides are included here, including some that were not shown due to time, but include information on diagnostics about characterization, SCCS and Patient-level Prediction
• Applications for the 2023-24 Kheiron Contributor Cohort are being accepted through May 15. This program, which is currently in its second year, will help onboard and mentor open-source developers in the community. Katy Sadowski, a member of the original cohort, provided a video and written testimonial about her experience with the Kheiron Cohort.
• Thank you to Anna Ostropolets for sharing the final version of the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies Assessment last week. As part of the Vocabularies improvement process, the OHDSI Coordinating Center established a diverse committee that governs the Vocabularies maintenance and improvement activities (George Hripcsak, Patrick Ryan, Peter Rijnbeek, Rae Woong Park, Mui Van Zandt and Christian Reich).
• Azza Shoaibi has led or participated in several network studies, helped lead the first two Phenotype Phebruaries, and presented during the lightning talks at the 2022 OHDSI Global Symposium. In the latest collaborator spotlight, Azza discusses her journey to observational health data work, why the science of phenotyping is both challenging and exciting, why she serves on the OHDSI Symposium Scientific Review Committee, and plenty more.
• The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available. This edition includes links to all SOS Challenge tutorials, information and videos from DevCon and the Kheiron Cohort, the latest collaborator spotlight, links to April publications and presentations, and the most recent podcast video. If you don’t receive the newsletter monthly, you can subscribe here.
• Joel Swerdel announced the release of PheValuator 2.2.7, which allows for previously created models to be used in evaluations. It also fixes a bug in getPopnPrev.sql for sql server.
• Katy Sadowski announced the release of DataQualityDashboard 2.2.0. This release adds the option to specify a cohortTableName when executing data quality checks on a cohort. It also contains several bug fixes which are detailed in the linked NEWS.md file.
• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.15.0. The important development here is a minor change to the DESCRIPTION file that was required by CRAN.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration is open, while the collaborator showcase submission deadline has passed.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration is open for this event. The call for participation deadline has passed. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage.
Job Postings
• There is an opening with IQVIA for an OMOP Data Analyst. Job overview: Under broad guidance, performs data analytics activities related to complex business problems and issues to provide insight to decision makers. May provide analytic support for internal project teams and for external client consulting or services engagements. You can find the full posting and apply here.
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The May 2 OHDSI Community Call provided the sixth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on network execution and was led by:
Jenna Reps (Associate Director, Janssen Research & Development)
Jack Brewster (Data Scientist, IQVIA)
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.
Community Updates
• Thank you to Anna Ostropolets for sharing the final version of the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies Assessment last week. As part of the Vocabularies improvement process, the OHDSI Coordinating Center established a diverse committee that governs the Vocabularies maintenance and improvement activities (George Hripcsak, Patrick Ryan, Peter Rijnbeek, Rae Woong Park, Mui Van Zandt and Christian Reich).
• Azza Shoaibi has led or participated in several network studies, helped lead the first two Phenotype Phebruaries, and presented during the lightning talks at the 2022 OHDSI Global Symposium. In the latest collaborator spotlight, Azza discusses her journey to observational health data work, why the science of phenotyping is both challenging and exciting, why she serves on the OHDSI Symposium Scientific Review Committee, and plenty more.
• The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available. This edition includes links to all SOS Challenge tutorials, information and videos from DevCon and the Kheiron Cohort, the latest collaborator spotlight, links to April publications and presentations, and the most recent podcast video. If you don’t receive the newsletter monthly, you can subscribe here.
• DevCon 2023 was held last month, and it was exciting to see so many people in the community join this event. All video presentations from the opening session are now available on the event homepage.
• DevCon also served to open applications for the 2023-24 Kheiron Contributor Cohort. This program, which is currently in its second year, will help onboard and mentor open-source developers in the community. Katy Sadowski, a member of the original cohort, provided a video and written testimonial about her experience with the Kheiron Cohort.
• The next session of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held May 8 (11 am – 12 pm ET), and it will include a conversation with Mui Van Zandt, VP/GM Real World Data & Tech, IQVIA). You can join that session here.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration is open, while the collaborator showcase submission deadline has passed.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration is open for this event. The call for participation deadline has passed. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage.
Job Postings
• There is an opening with IQVIA for an OMOP Data Analyst. Job overview: Under broad guidance, performs data analytics activities related to complex business problems and issues to provide insight to decision makers. May provide analytic support for internal project teams and for external client consulting or services engagements. You can find the full posting and apply here.
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The April 25 OHDSI Community Call provided the fifth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on analysis design and was led by:
Patrick Ryan (Vice President, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.)
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.
• The deadline to participate in the OHDSI European Symposium is less than one week away. The European call for participation, which is accepting submissions for posters and software demonstrations to be presented during the July 3 collaborator showcase, will conclude on Sunday, April 30.
• DevCon 2023 was held last Friday, and it was exciting to see so many people in the community join this event. All video presentations from the opening session are now available on the event homepage, and videos of the Session 2 workshops will be available later this week.
• DevCon also served to open applications for the 2023-24 Kheiron Contributor Cohort. This program, which is currently in its second year, will help onboard and mentor open-source developers in the community. Katy Sadowski, a member of the original cohort, provided a video and written testimonial about her experience with the Kheiron Cohort.
• The last two sessions of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series are now available on our YouTube channel: Seng Chan You (March) and Anna Ostropolets (April). The next session will be held on May 8, and it will include a conversation with Mui Van Zandt.
HADES Development Announcements
• Egill Fridgeirsson announced the release of DeepPatientLevelPrediction 1.1.4. This was a small change needed for running the package with Strategus. Now the device to develop the models on (GPU or CPU) can be controlled with an environment variable in the study package. Before it was hard coded in the study package. But users might want to select a certain GPU to use or even CPU for testing the package.
Thank you to all HADES developers for their continued work to maintain and enhance OHDSI open-source software. For more information on these or future releases, please visit this thread on the OHDSI forums.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration and the call for participation has opened for this event. The deadline for abstracts is April 30.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration is open for this event. The call for participation deadline has passed. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage.
Job Postings
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The April 18 OHDSI Community Call provided the fourth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on phenotype evaluation and was led by:
Azza Shoaibi (Associate Director, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.)
James Gilbert (Manager, Epidemiology Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.)
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.
• DevCon 2023 will be held virtually this Friday from 9 am – 3 pm ET (link: join DevCon here). The full agenda is available at the event homepage. The event will feature 11 short talks around five topics in the first session, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community during the second session. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.
• The deadline to participate in the OHDSI European Symposium is quickly approaching. The European call for participation, which is accepting submissions for posters and software demonstrations to be presented during the July 3 collaborator showcase, will conclude on Sunday, April 30.
• The last two sessions of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series are now available on our YouTube channel: Seng Chan You (March) and Anna Ostropolets (April).
• Martijn Schuemie announced the releases of SqlRender 1.14.0 (contains some fixes for Spark, Oracle, Netezza, and PostgreSQL), DatabaseConnector 6.2.0 (a large set of fixes for DataBricks), SelfControlledCaseSeries 4.2.0 (fixes a bug that caused regularization to not be applied to calendar-time splines), and CohortMethod 5.0.0 (this a major update with many changes, including a major overhaul of the framework for running multiple analyses. There are no guarantees for backwards compatibility, so please read the changelog carefully. This version should provide greater flexibility and stability than before.)
• Joel Swerdel announced the release of PheValuator 2.2.6, which creates an export folder with a set of results from the analysis as well as diagnostics for the run. This csv files may be used in shiny applications. Joel also posted a new PheValuator tutorial, which you can watch here.
• Marc Suchard announced the release of BrokenAdaptiveRidge v1.0.0, which is now part of HADES. This package enables approximate L0 (best subset) regression at scale using Cyclops. He also announced that Cyclops v3.3.1 has been released and is now on CRAN. This features the introduction of Jeffreys prior and several fixes for likelihood profiling.
• Egill Fridgeirsson announced the release of DeepPatientLevelPrediction 1.1.3. This was a minor fix for the CI. Our main dependancy, torch in R, wasn’t installing correctly since a new release of it was released on CRAN.
Thank you to all HADES developers for their continued work to maintain and enhance OHDSI open-source software. For more information on these or future releases, please visit this thread on the OHDSI forums.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration and the call for participation has opened for this event. The deadline for abstracts is April 30.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration is open for this event. The call for participation deadline has passed. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage.
Job Postings
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The April 11 OHDSI Community Call provided the third tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on phenotype development (both outcome and exposure design) and was led by:
Asieh Golozar (VP, Global Head of Data Science, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
Anna Ostropolets (Director, Head of Innovation Lab, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
SOS Challenge Week 3 • Focus: Data Diagnostics
Tutorial 1: Anna Ostropolets Recording | Asieh Golozar Recording Tutorial 2: Christian Reich/Gowtham Rao (Tuesday, 7 pm ET): Meeting Link
Office Hours with Gowtham Rao (Friday, 9:30 am – 10:30 am ET): Meeting Link
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.
Community Updates
• Congratulations to the team of Erica A. Voss, Azza Shoaibi, Lana Yin Hui Lai, Clair Blacketer, Thamir Alshammari, Rupa Makadia, Kevin Haynes, Anthony G. Sena, Gowtham Rao, Sebastiaan van Sandijk, Clement Fraboulet, Laurent Boyer, Tanguy Le Carrour, Scott Horban, Daniel R. Morales, Jordi Martínez Roldán, Juan Manuel Ramírez-Anguita, Miguel A. Mayer, Marcel de Wilde, Luis H. John, Talita Duarte-Salles, Elena Roel, Andrea Pistillo, Raivo Kolde, Filip Maljković, Spiros Denaxas, Vaclav Papez, Michael G. Kahn, Karthik Natarajan, Christian Reich, Alex Secora, Evan P. Minty, Nigam H. Shah, Jose D. Posada, Maria Teresa Garcia Morales, Diego Bosca, Honorio Cadenas Juanino, Antonio Diaz Holgado, Miguel Pedrera Jiménez, Pablo Serrano Balazote, Noelia García Barrio, Selçuk Şen, Ali Yağız Üresin, Baris Erdogan, Luc Belmans, Geert Byttebier, Manu L.N.G. Malbrain, Daniel J. Dedman, Zara Cuccu, Rohit Vashisht, Atul J. Butte, Ayan Patel, Lisa Dahm, Cora Han, Fan Bu, Faaizah Arshad, Anna Ostropolets, Fredrik Nyberg, George Hripcsak, Marc A. Suchard, Dani Prieto-Alhambra, Peter R. Rijnbeek, Martijn J. Schuemie, and Patrick B. Ryan on the publication of Contextualising adverse events of special interest to characterise the baseline incidence rates in 24 million patients with COVID-19 across 26 databases: a multinational retrospective cohort study in eClinicalMedicine.
• Deadlines to participate in the OHDSI Asia-Pacific (APAC) and European Symposiums are quickly approaching. The APAC call for participation ends Friday, April 15, while the European call for participation concludes Sunday, April 30.
• The next edition of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held Monday, April 10, from 11 am – 12 pm ET, and it will feature a conversation with Anna Ostropolets, a Titan Award honoree as an original leader with the vocabulary team and a DBMI PhD graduate whose interests include bias adjustment in phenotyping and evidence generalizability (Phoebe and KEEPER), as well as point of care evidence generation (Data Consult Service). You can join the meeting using this link.
• The next CBER Best seminar series presentation will take place Wednesday, April 12, at 11 am ET. Dr. Kaat Bollaerts, Head of Data Science at P95, will share her work on “Quantifying bias due to disease- and exposure misclassification in studies of vaccine effectiveness.” Registration is free for this virtual presentation, and everybody is welcome.
• The agenda and meeting link for DevCon 2023 is now available at the event homepage. The event will last from 9 am – 3 pm on April 21 and will feature 11 short talks around five topics (see agenda on the homepage) in the morning, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.
HADES Development Announcements
• Jamie Gilbert announced the releases of both CohortDiagnostics 3.2.0 and ResultModelManager 0.4.0. The CohortDiagnostics update removed package dependency snapshot capture as it was breaking on newer versions of R. The ResultModelManager release adds some vignettes on usage as well as a QueryNamespace class that adds a wrapper around SqlRender functionality that allows execution of queries with fixed parameters from result model specifications.
• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of EvidenceSynthesis 0.4.1. The only change is the addition of a video vignette, which was also featured in the ESMARConf 2023 conference.
• Chris Knoll announced the release of ATLAS/WebAPI 2.13.0. More information on both the ATLAS and WebAPI updates can be found within the links.
Thank you to all HADES developers for their continued work to maintain and enhance OHDSI open-source software. For more information on these or future releases, please visit this thread on the OHDSI forums.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration and the call for participation has opened for this event. The deadline for abstracts is April 30.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration and the call for participation has opened for this event. The call for participation deadline for abstracts is April 15. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage. The main conference will be held July 13 with sessions focused on OHDSI Global, Research, and OHDSI APAC, while there will be tutorials held on July 14. The call for collaboration is happening now, while registration details will be available shortly.
Job Postings
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
The April 4 OHDSI Community Call provided the second tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on data diagnostics and was led by:
Clair Blacketer (Director, Janssen Research and Development)
Mui Van Zandt (VP & GM Real World Data & Tech, IQVIA)
Sarah Seager (Director, A&AI, IQVIA)
SOS Challenge Week 2 • Focus: Data Diagnostics
Tutorial 1: Clair Blacketer/Mui Van Zandt (Tuesday, 11 am ET): Recording Tutorial 2: Clair Blacketer/Jing Li (Tuesday, 7 pm ET): Meeting Link
Office Hours with Clair Blacketer (Thursday, 10 am – 11 am ET): Meeting Link
For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.
• The next edition of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held Monday, April 10, from 11 am – 12 pm ET, and it will feature a conversation with Anna Ostropolets, a Titan Award honoree as an original leader with the vocabulary team and a DBMI PhD graduate whose interests include bias adjustment in phenotyping and evidence generalizability (Phoebe and KEEPER), as well as point of care evidence generation (Data Consult Service). You can join the meeting using this link.
• The latest OHDSI newsletter is now available. It includes community updates from the last month, including all March publications and presentations, updates on the SOS Challenge, DevCon, the latest collaborator spotlight, and plenty more. If you didn’t receive the newsletter in your inbox, you can subscribe here.
• Aniek Markus is pursuing her PhD at the department of Medical Informatics with a focus on explainable artificial intelligence at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She discussed her journey to health data science, her focus on explainable AI, and how OMOP and OHDSI tools are assisting her research career, in the latest OHDSI Collaborator Spotlight.
• The agenda and meeting link for DevCon 2023 is now available at the event homepage. The event will last from 9 am – 3 pm on April 21 and will feature 11 short talks around five topics (see agenda on the homepage) in the morning, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.
HADES Development Announcements
• Adam Black announced the release of Andromeda 0.6.3. This release add is AndromedaTable function that works with both the current andromeda tables (SQLite references) and the Andromeda v1.0 tables (Apache Arrow FileSystemDatasets). • Anthony Sena announced the release of Cohort Generator 0.8.0. This release of CohortGenerator adds the ability to generate subsets of cohorts. • Martin Lavallee announced the release of Capr 2.0.1. This is a patch release, so there are. No major changes.
Thank you to all HADES developers for their continued work to maintain and enhance OHDSI open-source software. For more information on these or future releases, please visit this thread on the OHDSI forums.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration and the call for participation has opened for this event. The deadline for abstracts is April 30.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration and the call for participation has opened for this event. The call for participation deadline for abstracts is April 15. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage. The main conference will be held July 13 with sessions focused on OHDSI Global, Research, and OHDSI APAC, while there will be tutorials held on July 14. The call for collaboration is happening now, while registration details will be available shortly.
Job Postings
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The March 28 OHDSI Community Call served as the official kickoff for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session provided an overview of how the two-month event will take place and announce the featured studies before moving into the first tutorial of the challenge, Initiating A Network Study. This call was led by:
Marc Suchard (Professor, Departments of Biomathematics and Human Genetics, UCLA)
Jody-Ann McLeggon (Program Manager, Columbia University)
• Aniek Markus, lead author of the afore-mentioned study, is pursuing her PhD at the department of Medical Informatics with a focus on explainable artificial intelligence at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She discussed her journey to health data science, her focus on explainable AI, and how OMOP and OHDSI tools are assisting her research career, in the latest OHDSI Collaborator Spotlight.
• The next edition of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held Monday, April 10, from 11 am – 12 pm ET, and it will feature a conversation with Anna Ostropolets, a Titan Award honoree as an original leader with the vocabulary team and a DBMI PhD graduate whose interests include bias adjustment in phenotyping and evidence generalizability (Phoebe and KEEPER), as well as point of care evidence generation (Data Consult Service). You can join the meeting using this link.
• Registration and the call for participation has opened for the 2023 Global Symposium, which will be held Oct. 20-22 in East Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, at the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center. Check out the event homepage for more information and registration/call for collaboration links.
• The 2023 APAC Symposium agenda is now posted on the event homepage. The main conference will be held July 13 with sessions focused on OHDSI Global, Research, and OHDSI APAC, while there will be tutorials held on July 14. The call for collaboration is happening now, while registration details will be available shortly.
• The agenda and meeting link for DevCon 2023 is now available at the event homepage. The event will last from 9 am – 3 pm on April 21 and will feature 11 short talks around five topics (see agenda on the homepage) in the morning, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.
• Last week, Martijn Schuemie hosted the latest CBER BEST Seminar Series with a talk on Negative controls and p-value calibration in RWE generation. If you missed the talk — or want to see it again — the video is now available. The next session will be held April 12 and will be led by Kaat Bollaerts; you can register for that seminar here.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage. The closing date is Friday, March 31.
HADES Development Announcements
• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.13.0, with a single bugfix for Netezza.
• Egill Fridgeirsson announced the release of DeepPatientLevelPrediction 1.1.1, which has both bug fixes and several new features: an automatic learning rate finder has been implemented, used by setting learningRate=”auto”; training loop parameters are now handled by a new settings object and as a result more of the training loop parameters are customizable by the user; custom metrics can be created by the user to use for early stopping and learning rate schedule; and seeds have been added in various places, making the whole process more reproducible
Thank you to all HADES developers for their continued work to maintain and enhance OHDSI open-source software. For more information on these or future releases, please visit this thread on the OHDSI forums.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J. Registration will open TOMORROW, March 21! Check out the symposium homepage for more information and the registration link.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. More information and registration links will be posted when available.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.
• Andrey Soares and Asiyah Lin are co-chairs of workshops and tutorials for the 2023 International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, a hybrid event which will be hosted Aug. 28-Sept. 1 by the University of Brasilia. If you would like to submit a workshop or tutorial, the deadline is April 3.
Job Postings
• Ajit Londheshared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.
• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The March 21 community five recent publications from the OHDSI community. Videos and slides of all presentations are available at the bottom of this section, while the study is linked to the titles here:
• Congratulations to the team of Vipina Keloth, Juan M Banda, Michael Gurley, Paul Heider, Georgina Kennedy, Hongfang Liu, Feifan Liu, Timothy Miller, Karthik Natarajan, Olga V Patterson, Yifan Peng, Kalpana Raja, Ruth M Reeves, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Jianlin Shi, Xiaoyan Wang, Yanshan Wang, Wei-Qi Wei, Andrew Williams, Rui Zhang, Rimma Belenkaya, Christian Reich, Clair Blacketer, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, Noémie Elhadad, and Hua Xu on the publication of Representing and Utilizing Clinical Textual Data for Real World Studies: An OHDSI Approach in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.
• The agenda and meeting link for DevCon 2023 is now available at the event homepage. The event will last from 9 am – 3 pm on April 21 and will feature 11 short talks around five topics (see agenda on the homepage) in the morning, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.
• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study Challenge will begin next week, and we are still seeking people who are interested in taking part in any way. If you are interested in joining this event, or you want to vote for your preferred research idea, please fill out this form by the end of Tuesday.
• The next edition of the CBER BEST Seminar Series will be held Wednesday, March 22, at 11 am ET, and will feature a presentation from Martijn Schuemie on ‘Negative controls and p-value calibration in RWE generation.’ More information and a registration link is available here.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage. The deadline is March 31.
HADES Development Announcements
• Martin Lavallee announced the release of Capr 2.0. This is a major update overhauling the user-interface of Capr. The intent of the overhaul is to improve the readability of the Capr code. For full details visit the package website.
• Martijn Schuemie announced the following updates this week: Bigknn 1.0.2 (adds support for the upcoming Andromeda release), SqlRender 1.13.0 (has some fixes for BigQuery, SQLite, and DuckDB), ROhdsiWebApi 1.3.3 (minor update to pass R Check again), and DatabaseConnector 6.1.0 (adds support for DuckDB, fixes some issues related to Java heap memory, and fixes some Snowflake issues).
• Katy Sadowski announced the release of DataQualityDashboard 2.1.2. This release contains a bug fix for the cdmDataType check SQL.
• Adam Black announced the release of Andromeda 0.6.2. This adds one function is AndromedaTable() that should work with both SQLite and Arrow andromeda tables.
Thank you to all HADES developers for their continued work to maintain and enhance OHDSI open-source software. For more information on these or future releases, please visit this thread on the OHDSI forums.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J. Registration is now open for the event.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration is now open for the event.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.
• The 2023 AMIA Symposium will be held Nov. 11-15 in New Orleans, La., and the annual call for participation is underway. Proposals are being accepted for papers, podium abstracts, panels, posters, debates, demos and workshops. The deadline is March 23, 2023.
Job Postings
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Christoph Lambert shared this new opening: The University of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center, Department of Internal Medicine, seeks a faculty member to join the Division of Translational Informatics. This position is at the Open rank and Tenure track. While the focus of the position is research-oriented, optionally, the position affords the opportunity for the candidate to have a joint clinical appointment for part-time clinical service with the University of New Mexico, and/or the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center. Applications are requested by March 13, 2023.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
Rates of Antipsychotic Drug Prescribing Among People Living With Dementia During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Hao Luo)
Safety outcomes of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in adolescent attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder with comorbid depression: the ASSURE study (Chungsoo Kim)
Risk of COVID-19 Diagnosis and Hospitalisation in Patients with Osteoarthritis or Back Pain Treated with Ibuprofen Compared to Other NSAIDs or Paracetamol: A Network Cohort Study (Junqing (Frank) Xie)
An ETL-process design for data harmonization to participate in international research with German real-world data based on FHIR and OMOP CDM (Yuan Peng)
Integrating real-world data to assess cardiac ablation device outcomes in a multicenter study using the OMOP common data model for regulatory decisions: implementation and evaluation (Yue Yu)
The March 14 community call brought back the popular debates format. Videos of both debates are available at the bottom of this section.
Debate 1 An authority has provided me an ICD-10 codelist to use to identify patients with a disease. I should use that source codelist ‘as is’ for verbatim replication, and not consider it as a starting point for phenotype development/evaluation process to model the authority’s intent using standard concepts. Debaters: Harold Lehmann (Professor of Health Sciences Informatics, Johns Hopkins University) and Anna Ostropolets (Clinical Data Scientist, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
Debate 2 Source chart review adjudication is a necessary component of phenotype evaluation to ensure reliable evidence. Debaters: Daniel Beachler (Director of Safety & Epidemiology, Carelon Research) and James Weaver (Associate Director, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research & Development)
• The agenda and meeting link for DevCon 2023 is now available at the event homepage. The event will last from 9 am – 3 pm on April 21 and will feature 11 short talks around five topics (see agenda on the homepage) in the morning, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.
• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study Challenge will begin March 28, and we are seeking people who are interested in taking part in any way. If you are interested in joining this event, or you want to vote for your preferred research idea, please fill out this form before March 21.
• The next edition of the CBER BEST Seminar Series will be held Wednesday, March 22, at 11 am ET, and will feature a presentation from Martijn Schuemie on ‘Negative controls and p-value calibration in RWE generation.’ More information and a registration link is available here.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. More information and registration links will be posted when available.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.
• The 2023 AMIA Symposium will be held Nov. 11-15 in New Orleans, La., and the annual call for participation is underway. Proposals are being accepted for papers, podium abstracts, panels, posters, debates, demos and workshops. The deadline is March 23, 2023.
Job Postings
• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.
• The Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.
• Christoph Lambert shared this new opening: The University of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center, Department of Internal Medicine, seeks a faculty member to join the Division of Translational Informatics. This position is at the Open rank and Tenure track. While the focus of the position is research-oriented, optionally, the position affords the opportunity for the candidate to have a joint clinical appointment for part-time clinical service with the University of New Mexico, and/or the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center. Applications are requested by March 13, 2023.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
Debate 1: An authority has provided me an ICD-10 codelist to use to identify patients with a disease. I should use that source codelist ‘as is’ for verbatim replication, and not consider it as a starting point for phenotype development/evaluation process to model the authority’s intent using standard concepts (Harold Lehmann, Anna Ostropolets)
Debate 2: Source chart review adjudication is a necessary component of phenotype evaluation to ensure reliable evidence (Bechler, Weaver)
The March 7 community call highlighted the research submissions shared for the Save Our Sisyphus Network Study Challenge. We heard about four study ideas that could serve as the foundation for our eight-week network study challenge this spring.
Is fluoroquinolone use really associated with the development of aortic aneurysms (Jack Janetzki, University of South Australia)
Amongst people with psoriasis, does exposure to Risankizumab increase the risk of venous thromboembolism while on treatment relative to other biologic therapies? (Zenas Yiu, University of Manchester)
Characterization: incidence of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) during Multiple Sclerosis (MS) biologic exposure (Thamir Alshammary, Almaarefa University)
Intravitreal Anti-VEGF and Kidney Failure (Cindy Cai, Johns Hopkins University)
• Congratulations to 2022 Titan Award for Methodological Research honoree Fan Bu, who accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, starting Jan. 1, 2024.
• Congratulations to Peter Rijnbeek, who held his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Scalable Evidence’, as Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at Erasmus University on Friday, March 3. Members of the OHDSI community shared their congratulatory messages to Peter.
• Andrey Soares and Asiyah Lin are co-chairs of workshops and tutorials for the 2023 International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, a hybrid event which will be hosted Aug. 28-Sept. 1 by the University of Brasilia. If you would like to submit a workshop or tutorial, the deadline is April 3.
• The OHDSI workgroups shared their goals for 2023 during the February community calls. All of the presentations are now available on the workgroups homepage.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage.
• Andrew Williams has announced an exciting new initiative at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts University. He is leading the new Center for Advanced Healthcare Research Informatics, which will work to produce new modes and methods of using healthcare-generated data and other related data to support research, and to use these methods at Tufts Medicine and in research communities to generate evidence and improve care.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. More information and registration links will be posted when available.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.
• The 2023 AMIA Symposium will be held Nov. 11-15 in New Orleans, La., and the annual call for participation is underway. Proposals are being accepted for papers, podium abstracts, panels, posters, debates, demos and workshops. The deadline is March 23, 2023.
• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.
HADES Development Announcements
• Katy Sadowski announced the release of DataQualityDashboard 2.1.1. This is the first release of the package which meets all HADES requirements, and hereafter DQD will be a part of HADES. You can read more about the update here.
Job Postings
• Christoph Lambert shared this new opening: The University of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center, Department of Internal Medicine, seeks a faculty member to join the Division of Translational Informatics. This position is at the Open rank and Tenure track. While the focus of the position is research-oriented, optionally, the position affords the opportunity for the candidate to have a joint clinical appointment for part-time clinical service with the University of New Mexico, and/or the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center. Applications are requested by March 13, 2023.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
Is fluoroquinolone use really associated with the development of aortic aneurysms (Jack Janetzki, University of South Australia)
Amongst people with psoriasis, does exposure to Risankizumab increase the risk of venous thromboembolism while on treatment relative to other biologic therapies? (Zenas Yiu, University of Manchester)
Characterization: incidence of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) during Multiple Sclerosis (MS) biologic exposure (Thamir Alshammary, Almaarefa University)
Intravitreal Anti-VEGF and Kidney Failure (Cindy Cai, Johns Hopkins University)
The Feb. 28 community call provided our final update on Phenotype Phebruary, which was led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. Evan Minty and Khyzer Aziz discussed some specific phenotype work around neonatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, while Azza Shoiabi provided an impressive wrap-up of all the outputs from the month. To join or follow any of these discussions, please visit our Phenotype Phebruary homepage.
We also had our fourth week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from our OHDSI workgroups. This week, we heard about the following teams: Clinical Trials (Mike Hamidi), Vaccine Vocabulary (Asiyah Lin), Medical Devices (Asiyah Lin), Education (Nigel Hughes), FHIR & OMOP (Davera Gabriel), Medical Imaging (Paul Nagy), Perinatal and Reproductive Health Group (Alison Callahan), and Prediction (Jenna Reps).
The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.
Community Updates
• Congratulations to the team of Anna Ostropolets, Yasser Albogami, Mitchell Conover, Juan Banda, William Baumgartner, Clair Blacketer, Priyamvada Desai, Scott DuVall, Stephen Fortin, James Gilbert, Asieh Golozar, Joshua Ide, Andrew Kanter, David Kern, Chungsoo Kim, Lana Lai, Chenyu Li, Feifan Liu, Kristine Lynch, Evan Minty, Maria Inês Neves, Ding Quan Ng, Tontel Obene, Victor Pera, Nicole Pratt, Gowtham Rao, Nadav Rappoport, Ines Reinecke, Paola Saroufim, Azza Shoaibi, Katherine Simon, Marc Suchard, Joel Swerdel, Erica Voss, James Weaver, Linying Zhang, George Hripcsak, and Patrick Ryan on the publication of Reproducible variability: assessing investigator discordance across 9 research teams attempting to reproduce the same observational study in JAMIA.
• Faaizah Arshad is a psychology major at UCLA who has already taken a strong role within the OHDSI community. The 2021 Titan Award recipient for Community Support, she became the first undergraduate to take part in a symposium plenary when she presented on ‘The EUMAEUS project: Applying methods sequentially’ during the 2021 Global Symposium. In the latest collaborator spotlight, she discusses how OHDSI has impacted her undergraduate education, how she was able to make such an impact so early in her journey in observational research, and why she believes other junior researchers can make an impact in OHDSI.
• Andrew Williams has announced an exciting new initiative at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts University. He is leading the new Center for Advanced Healthcare Research Informatics, which will work to produce new modes and methods of using healthcare-generated data and other related data to support research, and to use these methods at Tufts Medicine and in research communities to generate evidence and improve care.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• We are excited to officially announce the OHDSI 2023 Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 in East Brunswick, New Jersey at the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center. Registration will be opened shortly, as well as a website with information, including travel details for those who will no longer fly to Washington DC. We have three great days of community collaboration opportunities in store, so we hope to see you all there.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. More information and registration links will be posted when available.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.
• The 2023 AMIA Symposium will be held Nov. 11-15 in New Orleans, La., and the annual call for participation is underway. Proposals are being accepted for papers, podium abstracts, panels, posters, debates, demos and workshops. The deadline is March 8, 2023.
• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.
HADES Development Announcements
• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.12.1. This contains two bugfixes for Snowflake.
Job Postings
• Christoph Lambert shared this new opening: The University of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center, Department of Internal Medicine, seeks a faculty member to join the Division of Translational Informatics. This position is at the Open rank and Tenure track. While the focus of the position is research-oriented, optionally, the position affords the opportunity for the candidate to have a joint clinical appointment for part-time clinical service with the University of New Mexico, and/or the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center. Applications are requested by March 13, 2023.
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• Georgina Kennedy shared a recent opportunity for a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, to join in a project to understand the current use and future potential of real-world data to measure, explain and respond to variation in clinical cancer care. This funded position comes with a living costs stipend, and a technical background is required. You can learn more about the position/project here, and you can reach out to georgina.kennedy@unsw.edu.au for more information.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared an opening for a Database Programmer to join the Health Data Sciences research group at the University of Oxford. According to the posting, you will develop new database applications for big clinical data to meet project requirements and deadlines, provide software feedback and carry out software improvement, extension, integration and further development on existing code. You will contribute to the harmonisation, curation, and processing of large clinical datasets and develop code to validate, test, document and maintain database applications. The full ad and application link are available here, and the closing date is Feb. 27, 2023.
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The Feb. 21 community call provided our third update on Phenotype Phebruary, which was led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. The phenotype discussions that were featured during Week 3 included Parkinson’s disease (Allan Wu) and myocardial infarction (Mirza Khan/Adam Atif), and Mirza Khan joins the discussion to provide an update on myocardial infarction. Khyzer Aziz discusses early work done on the Week 4 phenotype, Neonatal Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy. There is also an ongoing discussion on what makes cohort definitions reusable, which will be included in the update. To join or follow any of these discussions, please visit our Phenotype Phebruary homepage.
We also had our third week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from our OHDSI workgroups. This week, we heard about the following teams: Early-Stage Researchers (Faaizah Arshad), Healthcare Systems Special Interest Group (Melanie Philofsky), Oncology (Asieh Golozar), Eye Care and Vision Science (Michelle Hribar), Latin America (Jose Posada), Psychiatry (Dmitry Dymshyts), and Health Equity (Jake Gillberg).
The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.
• Andrew Williams has announced an exciting new initiative at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts University. He is leading the new Center for Advanced Healthcare Research Informatics, which will work to produce new modes and methods of using healthcare-generated data and other related data to support research, and to use these methods at Tufts Medicine and in research communities to generate evidence and improve care.
• Phenotype Phebruary continues, and there is now a homepage on OHDSI.org that contains direct links to all forum threads, as well as videos from both phenotype discussions and updates from community calls.
• #OHDSI2023 is coming Oct. 20-22, and we are looking for people to join the scientific review committee. If you are interested in helping review our community research in the leadup to our global symposium, please fill out this form.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage.
• The EHDEN Academy recently announced its newest addition, a one-hour module on “the phenotyping program” led by Gowtham Rao. Please visit the EHDEN Academy homepage to take this or any of the Academy’s 20+ courses and join the 3,500 students across 100 nations who have already enrolled.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra announced that applications are open for the 2023 Health Data Science Black Internship Programme at the University of Oxford. This will be an eight-week paid internship this summer for junior Black researchers to expand their knowledge around health data science and gain the experience needed to either begin or advance a career in the field. Learn more and apply here!
• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study event begins in late March, but we are currently looking for an interesting research question to kick off this event. If you have one and would like to serve as P.I. for this global collaboration, please fill out this form. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 28.
OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities
• We are excited to officially announce the OHDSI 2023 Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 in East Brunswick, New Jersey at the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center. Registration will be opened shortly, as well as a website with information, including travel details for those who will no longer fly to Washington DC. We have three great days of community collaboration opportunities in store, so we hope to see you all there.
• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. More information and registration links will be posted when available.
• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.
• The 2023 AMIA Symposium will be held Nov. 11-15 in New Orleans, La., and the annual call for participation is underway. Proposals are being accepted for papers, podium abstracts, panels, posters, debates, demos and workshops. The deadline is March 8, 2023.
• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.
HADES Development Announcements
• There were three announcements of new HADES updates over the last week. Jamie Gilbert announced the release of ResultModelManager v0.3.0; Gowtham Rao announced the release of CohortExplorer v0.0.11; and Martijn Schuemie shared the release of ROhdsiWebApi 1.3.2. Read more about these updates here.
Job Postings
• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.
• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• Georgina Kennedy shared a recent opportunity for a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, to join in a project to understand the current use and future potential of real-world data to measure, explain and respond to variation in clinical cancer care. This funded position comes with a living costs stipend, and a technical background is required. You can learn more about the position/project here, and you can reach out to georgina.kennedy@unsw.edu.au for more information.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared an opening for a Database Programmer to join the Health Data Sciences research group at the University of Oxford. According to the posting, you will develop new database applications for big clinical data to meet project requirements and deadlines, provide software feedback and carry out software improvement, extension, integration and further development on existing code. You will contribute to the harmonisation, curation, and processing of large clinical datasets and develop code to validate, test, document and maintain database applications. The full ad and application link are available here, and the closing date is Feb. 27, 2023.
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The Feb. 14 community call provided our second update on Phenotype Phebruary, which was led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. The phenotype discussions that were featured during Week 2 included systemic lupus erythematous (Dani Prieto-Alhambra/Joel Swerdel), acute hepatic failure (Patrick Ryan/Christian Reich), and idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (Chistopher Mecoli/Asieh Golozar). There was also an ongoing discussion on evaluation, which will be included in the update. To join or follow any of these discussions, please visit our Phenotype Phebruary homepage.
We also had our second week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from our OHDSI workgroups. On Tuesday, we will hear about the following teams: ATLAS/WebAPI (Anthony Sena), Registry (Tina Parciak), OHDSI China (Lei Liu), CDM Vocabulary Subgroup (Michael Kallfelz), Dentistry (Robert Koski), APAC Steering Group (Mui Van Zandt), GIS (Kyle Zollo-Venecek), and NLP (Hua Xu).
The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.
Community Updates
• Phenotype Phebruary continues, and there is now a homepage on OHDSI.org that contains direct links to all forum threads, as well as videos from both phenotype discussions and updates from community calls.
• The OHDSI European Symposium will be held July 1-3. More information will come.
• #OHDSI2023 is coming Oct. 20-22, and we are looking for people to join the scientific review committee. If you are interested in helping review our community research in the leadup to our global symposium, please fill out this form.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage.
• The EHDEN Academy recently announced that its free, virtual academic program that contains 17 courses around all aspects of real-world-evidence generation has been used in more than 100 countries by nearly 3,500 course enrollees. If you are interested in learning more or getting started, please visit the EHDEN Academy homepage.
• Rachael Davis is leading a network study to characterize and evaluate trends in pathways for antiretroviral therapy (ART) for individuals who have been diagnosed with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and treated persistently over two years. She is seeking collaborators and data partners for this study. Please reach out raechel.davis@yale.edu if you are interested in collaborating or participating.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra announced that applications are open for the 2023 Health Data Science Black Internship Programme at the University of Oxford. This will be an eight-week paid internship this summer for junior Black researchers to expand their knowledge around health data science and gain the experience needed to either begin or advance a career in the field. Learn more and apply here!
• Anna Ostropolets introduced a vocabulary landscape assessment survey to directly inform which vocabularies and activities the vocabulary team prioritizes in 2023. There is also an ETL-specific survey for those who perform ETL or have an OMOP CDM instance at their disposal. More information on this survey is posted below, and the deadline is Feb. 23.
• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study event begins in late March, but we are currently looking for an interesting research question to kick off this event. If you have one and would like to serve as P.I. for this global collaboration, please fill out this form.
• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.
• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.
Job Postings
• The Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) seeks exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• Georgina Kennedy shared a recent opportunity for a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, to join in a project to understand the current use and future potential of real-world data to measure, explain and respond to variation in clinical cancer care. This funded position comes with a living costs stipend, and a technical background is required. You can learn more about the position/project here, and you can reach out to georgina.kennedy@unsw.edu.au for more information.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared an opening for a Database Programmer to join the Health Data Sciences research group at the University of Oxford. According to the posting, you will develop new database applications for big clinical data to meet project requirements and deadlines, provide software feedback and carry out software improvement, extension, integration and further development on existing code. You will contribute to the harmonisation, curation, and processing of large clinical datasets and develop code to validate, test, document and maintain database applications. The full ad and application link are available here, and the closing date is Feb. 27, 2023.
• The Observational Health Data Analytics (OHDA) team at Janssen Research & Development recently opened up three new internships for the coming year, with each lasting at least 10 weeks and starting around the middle of May. There are openings for an epidemiology graduate intern, a graduate intern, and an undergraduate intern; check out the respective links for more information and an application link.
• Janssen also announced two summer internships for a Data Science RWE for R&D position, and a Data Science RWE DevCon position. Within this role, interns will work on a project that seeks to develop phenotypes of interest for Janssen CVM development programs using the OMOP CDM and to use evaluation methods to characterize them according to performance and portability to different datasets. The interns will gain relevant experience in development and systematic evaluation of phenotypes in large RWD.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The Feb. 7 community call provided our first update on Phenotype Phebruary, which is being led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. The phenotype discussions that began during Week 1 included acute pancreatitis (Evan Minty), anaphylaxis (Andrea Noel), appendicitis (Azza Shoaibi), and neutropenia (Anna Ostropolets).
We also had our first week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from the following OHDSI workgroups: Common Data Model (Clair Blacketer), Data Quality (Clair Blacketer), Perioperative Medicine and Surgery (Jenny Lane), HADES (Martijn Schuemie), PLE Methods Research (Martijn Schuemie), Open-Source Community (Adam Black), and the Steering Group (Patrick Ryan).
The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.
Community Updates
• Congratulations to Sara Khalid, an OHDSI collaborator who was recently awarded the title of Associate Professor at the University of Oxford.
• Rachael Davis is leading a network study to characterize and evaluate trends in pathways for antiretroviral therapy (ART) for individuals who have been diagnosed with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and treated persistently over two years. She is seeking collaborators and data partners for this study. Please reach out raechel.davis@yale.edu if you are interested in collaborating or participating.
• The next edition of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held Monday, Feb. 13, and will feature a discussion with Paul Nagy. The session will be held between 11 am – 12 pm during the monthly Early-Stage Researchers workgroup meeting (join the WG here). Please use this link to join the meeting directly.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra announced that applications are open for the 2023 Health Data Science Black Internship Programme at the University of Oxford. This will be an eight-week paid internship this summer for junior Black researchers to expand their knowledge around health data science and gain the experience needed to either begin or advance a career in the field. Learn more and apply here!
• Anna Ostropolets introduced a vocabulary landscape assessment survey to directly inform which vocabularies and activities the vocabulary team prioritizes in 2023. More information on this survey is posted below, and the deadline is Feb. 23.
• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study event begins in late March, but we are currently looking for an interesting research question to kick off this event. If you have one and would like to serve as P.I. for this global collaboration, please fill out this form.
• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.
• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.
• The CBER BEST Seminar Series returns Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 11 am ET, as 2022 Titan Award recipient Fan Bu will provide a presentation on Bayesian Safety Surveillance with Adaptive Bias Correction. More information and a registration link is available here.
• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.
Job Postings
• The Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) seeks exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.
• The Observational Health Data Analytics (OHDA) team at Janssen Research & Development recently opened up three new internships for the coming year, with each lasting at least 10 weeks and starting around the middle of May. There are openings for an epidemiology graduate intern, a graduate intern, and an undergraduate intern; check out the respective links for more information and an application link.
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared an opening for a Database Programmer to join the Health Data Sciences research group at the University of Oxford. According to the posting, you will develop new database applications for big clinical data to meet project requirements and deadlines, provide software feedback and carry out software improvement, extension, integration and further development on existing code. You will contribute to the harmonisation, curation, and processing of large clinical datasets and develop code to validate, test, document and maintain database applications. The full ad and application link are available here, and the closing date is Feb. 27, 2023.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The Jan. 31 community call provided an introduction to Phenotype Phebruary. This community-wide initiative is meant to both develop and evaluate phenotypes for health outcomes that will be investigated by the community. Before the Feb. 1 kickoff, we will learn about the initiative from:
Patrick Ryan — Vice President, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Gowtham Rao — Senior Director, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.; Phenotype Development & Evaluation Workgroup Lead
Azza Shoaibi — Associate Director, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.; OHDSI2022 presenter on “OHDSI Phenotype Phebruary: lessons learned”
The video presentation and slide decks for each talk are available below.
• Congratulations to the team of Hao Luo, Wallis C. Y. Lau, Yi Chai, Carmen Olga Torre, Robert Howard, Kathy Y. Liu, Xiaoyu Lin, Can Yin, Stephen Fortin, David M. Kern, Dong Yun Lee, Rae Woong Park, Jae-Won Jang, Celine S. L. Chui, Jing Li, Christian Reich, Kenneth K. C. Man, and Ian C. K. Wong on the publication of Rates of Antipsychotic Drug Prescribing Among People Living With Dementia During the COVID-19 Pandemic in JAMA Psychiatry.
• Anna Ostropolets introduced a vocabulary landscape assessment survey to directly inform which vocabularies and activities the vocabulary team prioritizes in 2023. More information on this survey is posted below, and the deadline is Feb. 23.
• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study event begins in late March, but we are currently looking for an interesting research question to kick off this event. If you have one and would like to serve as P.I. for this global collaboration, please fill out this form.
• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.
• Save The Date! The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium is scheduled for Oct. 20-22. The location and more details will be shared when available.
• There have been several recent releases from the HADES development team over the last week. Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.12.0 and DatabaseConnector 6.0.0, and Chris Knoll announced the release of CirceR 1.3.0. You can read more about the new releases on this forum post.
• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.
• The CBER BEST Seminar Series returns Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 11 am ET, as 2022 Titan Award recipient Fan Bu will provide a presentation on Bayesian Safety Surveillance with Adaptive Bias Correction. More information and a registration link is available here.
• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.
Openings
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared an opening for a Database Programmer to join the Health Data Sciences research group at the University of Oxford. According to the posting, you will develop new database applications for big clinical data to meet project requirements and deadlines, provide software feedback and carry out software improvement, extension, integration and further development on existing code. You will contribute to the harmonisation, curation, and processing of large clinical datasets and develop code to validate, test, document and maintain database applications. The full ad and application link are available here, and the closing date is Feb. 27, 2023.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The Jan. 24 community call hosted an important conversation about ways the OHDSI community can collaborate to achieve three strategic priorities presented at the start of the year.
During the initial community call of 2023, Patrick Ryan shared a trio of foundational pillars that need to be strengthened to enable reliable evidence generation. In this call, Patrick joined Anna Ostropolets and Clair Blacketer to propose specific strategies to address these three priorities:
Standardized vocabularies
Standardized data network
Collaborating on network studies: “The Sisyphus Challenge”
The video presentation and slide decks for each talk are available below.
Community Updates
• Save The Date! The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium is scheduled for Oct. 20-22. The location and more details will be shared when available.
• There have been several recent releases from the HADES development team since the start of 2023, including SelfControlledCaseSeries 4.1.0, EvidenceSynthesis 0.4.0, SqlRender 1.11.1, and Characterization 0.0.5. Thank you to package maintainers Martijn Schuemie and Jenna Reps for their leadership with these open-source tools.
• JSM (Joint Statistical Meeting) 2023 will be held Aug. 5-10 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening now, and the deadline is Feb. 1, 2023.
• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.
• The CBER BEST Seminar Series returns Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 11 am ET, as 2022 Titan Award recipient Fan Bu will provide a presentation on Bayesian Safety Surveillance with Adaptive Bias Correction. More information and a registration link is available here.
• Jenna Reps, co-lead of the PLP workgroup, recently shared several video tutorials of version 6 of the PatientLevelPrediction tool. The demos are available on both our website and our YouTube page.
• The 2023 Oxford Real World Evidence Summer School will take place June 19-23 at the University of Oxford. Dani Prieto-Alhambra will serve as a course director for a session that will provide participants with the tools and concepts necessary to plan and execute Real World Evidence studies, with a focus on the use of the OMOP common data model. More information and a registration link are available here.
• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
The Jan. 17 community call provided an opportunity to either re-connect or meet and mingle with many new community members via our own version of ‘speed dating.’ This call had multiple sessions with different breakout rooms, so there is not a recording of those sessions.
• Jenna Reps, co-lead of the PLP workgroup, recently shared several video tutorials of version 6 of the PatientLevelPrediction tool. The demos are available on both our website and our YouTube page.
• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.
• The 2023 Oxford Real World Evidence Summer School will take place June 19-23 at the University of Oxford. Dani Prieto-Alhambra will serve as a course director for a session that will provide participants with the tools and concepts necessary to plan and execute Real World Evidence studies, with a focus on the use of the OMOP common data model. More information and a registration link are available here.
• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.
During the initial OHDSI community call of 2023, Patrick Ryan highlighted several community initiatives, activities and opportunities that can provide a foundation to further our shared mission of improving health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care. There were three main pillars around OHDSI work in 2023 that was highlighted: 1) standardized vocabularies; 2) a standardized data network; 3) standardized open-source tools. There was also discussion around a community-run network study in the spring, the return of Phenotype Phebruary and DevCon, and plenty more.
Community Updates
• Congratulations to the team of Justin Reese, Hannah Blau, Elena Casiraghi, Timothy Bergquist, Johanna Loomba, Tiffany Callahan, Bryan Laraway, Corneliu Antonescu, Ben Coleman, Michael Gargano, Kenneth Wilkins, Luca Cappelletti, Tommaso Fontana, Nariman Ammar, Blessy Antony, T M Murali, J Harry Caufield, Guy Karlebach, Julie McMurry, Andrew Williams, Richard Moffitt, Jineta Banerjee, Anthony Solomonides, Hannah Davis, Kristin Kostka, Giorgio Valentini, David Sahner, Christopher Chute, Charisse Madlock-Brown, Melissa Haendel, Peter Robinson; the N3C Consortium, and the RECOVER Consortium on the publication of Generalisable long COVID subtypes: Findings from the NIH N3C and RECOVER programmes in eBioMedicine.
• The latest edition of The Journey, the official OHDSI newsletter, is now available. This edition includes a final look back over 2022, recent community updates, the latest video podcast, publications & presentations, and plenty more. If you don’t receive the newsletter at the start of each month, you can subscribe here.
• The 2023 Oxford Real World Evidence Summer School will take place June 19-23 at the University of Oxford. Dani Prieto-Alhambra will serve as a course director for a session that will provide participants with the tools and concepts necessary to plan and execute Real World Evidence studies, with a focus on the use of the OMOP common data model. More information and a registration link are available here.
• Thamir AlShammary, an advisor to the President of the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA), has been an active contributor to the OHDSI community for several years. He collaborates in several workgroups, including Population-Level Estimation, Health Equity and the recently-completed Vaccine Evidence WG, and has been a contributor in several important network studies. He discusses his background, his journey into OHDSI and the impact he has seen, and why OHDSI can be a difference maker in generating trustworthy evidence, tools and best practices within the community, in the latest edition of the Collaborator Spotlight.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.