OHDSI Community Calls

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

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slides

Community Updates

Breakout Recordings

Clinical Epidemiology

Information/Data Management

Open-Source Software Development

Statistical Methods

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

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slides

Video Presentations

PHOEBE (Anna Ostropolets)

Cohort Diagnostics (Gowtham Rao)

ATC Hierarchy (Christian Reich)

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

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

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slides

OHDSI OKR Mid-Year Review Presentation (Patrick Ryan)

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

OHDSI Games Video

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

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

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

Slides

Introduction | PIONEER Presentation

Video Presentation

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

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

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debate Recordings

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

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

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presentation Slides

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

Presentation Recordings

GIS – Geographic Information System (Robert Miller, Tufts)

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

UK Biobank/Registry (Maxim Moinat, The Hyve)

Electronic Health Records (Melanie Philofsky, Odysseus
Data Services)

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presentation Slides

Introduction | APAC Update

Presentation Recordings

Asia-Pacific Regional Updates

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

Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presentation Slides

Introduction | Callahan/Posada | Schilling | Natarajan

Presentation Recordings

Stanford University (Alison Callahan/Jose Posada)

University of Colorado-Denver (Lisa Schilling)

Columbia University (Karthik Natarajan)

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

Updates 

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

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

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

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

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

Video Tutorials

ATHENA/Vocabulary (Michael Kallfelz)

Creating Cohort Definitions in ATLAS (Asieh Golozar)

ACHILLES (Frank DeFalco)

USAGI (Maxim Moinat)

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

Updates and Shoutouts 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slides 

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

Video Presentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updates and Shoutouts

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

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

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

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

Slides 

Introduction + Data Visualizations

Video Presentation

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

Updates and Shoutouts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slides 

FDA Best Collaboration | Introduction

Video Presentation

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save The Dates

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

Presentation Slides

Introduction • Reps • Williams

Recordings

Best Practices for Prediction Using Observational Data (Jenna Reps)

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

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

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save The Dates

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

Presentation Slides

Introduction • Psychiatry WG • Medical Devices WG • Oncology WG

Recordings

Oncology WG (Shilpa Ratwani) 

https://youtu.be/ZpzTZyaZRSs

Psychology WG (Dmitry Dymshyts)

Natural Language Processing WG (Hua Xu)

Medical Devices WG (Asiyah Lin)

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

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

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

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

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

Save The Dates

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

Presentation Slides

Introduction

Recordings

ATLAS Breakout (Facilitators: Greg Klebanov and Anthony Sena)

ETL Breakout (Facilitators: Clair Blacketer and Melanie Philofsky)

HADES Breakout (Facilitators: Adam Black and Marc Suchard)

https://youtu.be/_VXBKdzjEk8

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save The Dates

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

Presentation Slides

Introduction • CHARYBDIS • SCYLLA • Vaccine AESI Study

Recordings 

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

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

Vaccine Adverse Events of Special Interest Characterization Study • George Hripcsak

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

Recordings 

EHDEN Overview (Peter Rijnbeek & Nigel Hughes)

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

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

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

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

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

Please be aware of these two upcoming deadlines:

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

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

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

SAVE THE DATES

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

Presentation Slides

Introduction • OHDSI Overview (PDF) (PPT)

Recordings 

OHDSI Overview (Patrick Ryan)

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

OHDSI Microsoft Teams Tour (Patrick Ryan)

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

https://youtu.be/-fIrlNQIYaM

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week

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

Presentations

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

OHDSI Shoutouts and Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

CDM Workgroup Update (Christian Reich)

Data Quality Workgroup Update (Clair Blacketer)

PLP/PLE Workgroup Update (Marc Suchard)

HADES Workgroup Update (Martijn Schuemie)

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

Shoutouts and updates from the week:

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

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

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

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

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

Breakout Session Videos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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