OHDSI veterans understand the speed and efficiency of its tools, but it remains a thrill when they get to share that knowledge with potential future collaborators. That was the case at the 2019 Fudan Tutorial, where nearly 80 individuals gained first-hand knowledge of OHDSI capabilities.
“When we started the tutorials, we asked the students how long they thought research should take,” said Kristin Kostka, one of the OHDSI collaborators who led the tutorial. “The students guessed anywhere from 4 months to over 10 years. It was so exciting to show the power, speed and agility of the OHDSI network through this Fudan bootcamp.
“By the end of Day 4, we’d executed a patient-level prediction model on multiple OHDSI sites and had a drafted paper,” Kostka added. “Watching the students walk away with excitement to do this again at their own institutions was everything!”
The event took place August 5-8 at Fudan University in Shanghai. While nearly half of the attendees were from the host university, there were also many others from hospitals, universities and companies. Among the hospitals represented were Zhongshan, Huashan (both affiliated with Fudan University, Shanghai), Shanghai Changhai, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Fudan University Children’s Hospital, Fudan University Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, and Fudan University Eye and ENT Hospital.
Kostka joined Patrick Ryan, Lingyi Tang and Mui Van Zandt to lead the tutorial. Over the course of four days, the enthusiastic participants experienced sessions on the OMOP CDM/Vocabulary, Phenotyping and Cohort Building, Characterization and Prediction, ETL and an evaluation of the results that Kostka found such an inspirational experience to share with the attendees.
This tutorial was part of the “Biomedical Informatics” course at Fudan University. All students can take this course, taught by Prof. Liu, for credit. The full video playlist of the event (currently being uploaded) and course information is available online.
“It was exciting to watch the OHDSI network continue to build during these tutorials,” Kostka said. “The attendees who joined us were enthusiastic learners, and we believe they have a chance to make a real impact within our community as collaborators.”
