OHDSI2021 Plenary Sessions

The 2021 OHDSI Symposium will include two plenary sessions. Below are details on each one.

Plenary 1: OHDSI Impact on the COVID-19 Pandemic (Sept. 14, 8 am)

The first plenary will be held Tuesday, Sept. 14, beginning at 8 am ET, and it will have an extended community discussion about the COVID-19 pandemic and the work that the OHDSI community has played in advancing the science through methodological research as well as the clinical impact of the work to date. It will then have a distinguished panel to react to the content and provide perspective on directions where we can all move forward together.

The session will start at with the State of the Community address by George Hripcsak. We will also hear updates about OHDSI’s US Network from Kristin Kostka, European efforts from Peter Rijnbeek, and progress from our Asia-Pacific community from Mui Van Zandt.

At 9 am ET, there will have series of presentations on Methods Research for COVID-19, across our community’s primary analytic use cases of Characterization, Estimation, and Prediction:

• Anna Ostropolets will present on evaluating incidence rate sensitivity and the impact of anchoring.

• Rupa Makadia will present findings on the sensitivity of incidence rates to phenotype algorithm choices.

• Martijn Schuemie will provide an overview and showcase main results from the EUMAEUS project: a methods evaluation of vaccine surveillance approaches.

• Faaizah Arshad will highlight a particularly important finding from EUMAEUS: the performance when applying methods sequentially.

• Jenna Reps will present progress on developing large-scale prediction models and the impact of applying a model trained in one context to other.

At 10 am ET, there will be a series of presentations on OHDSI’s clinical impact during the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Seng Chan You will highlight prior published work by the community during the early part of the pandemic

• Talita Duarte-Salles will review the progress and results from the CHARYBDIS project: a large-scale characterization of COVID disease natural history.

• Albert Prats-Uribe will showcase characterization of drug utilization patterns amongst COVID patients.

• Xintong Li will discuss the impact of OHDSI’s work in characterizing background rates of COVID vaccine adverse events of special interest.

• Marc Suchard will highlight lessons learned in the SCYLLA project: a large-scale population-level effect estimation study to examine potential repurposed COVID therapeutics.

• George Hripcsak will introduce the latest research into using electronic health record data to study vaccine effectiveness.

At 11 am ET, we will have a reaction panel, moderated by Dani Prieto-Alhambra, with a distinguished panel that includes Catherine Cohet, Richard Forshee, Magdalena Sobieszczyk and Joanne Waldstreicher.

Plenary 2: The Journey to Reliable Evidence (Sept. 15, 8 am)

Watch Here

The second plenary will be held Wednesday, Sept. 15, beginning at 8 am ET, and it will feature an exciting interactive session that will dig into the question ‘what do we need to do to generate reliable evidence?’

There will be an in-depth case study of a recent observational study, “Glucagon-Like Peptide 1 Receptor Agonists and Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease Exacerbations Among Patients With Type 2 Diabetes”, published in Diabetes Care, and led by Yasser Albogami. To be fully engaged in this session, you are strongly encouraged to read this publication ahead of the plenary session. This study will be examined from multiple perspectives and entire community will be engaged in a conversation about when do we believe evidence is strong enough to be trusted and acted upon. There will be a distinguished panel to react to the content and provide perspective on directions where we can all move forward together.

Yasser Albogami will open the session with a discussion on his study “Glucagon-Like Peptide 1 Receptor Agonists and Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease Exacerbations Among Patients With Type 2 Diabetes.” Anna Ostropolets will follow with lessons from the OHDSI Reproducibility Challenge, which will be held Monday, Sept. 13.

There will be two talks focused on The Journey to Reliable Evidence. Mitchell Conover will present on reproducibility, while Christian Reich will present on generalizability. Kristin Kostka will host a reaction panel on these talks, featuring Shirley Wang, Thamer Alshammary and Rohan Khera.

The session will conclude with a talk from David Madigan on The Journey Ahead Toward Reliable Evidence, and the closing session (including Titan Award honorees), which will once again be led by Patrick Ryan.

There will be two ways to join the Plenary session:

1 – The meeting will take place as a MSTeams Webinar. You will receive a calendar invitation with a link if you registered. Click on the link and you will join the meeting as an attendee. As an attendee, you will be able to ask questions of the presenters and panelists by typing into the Chat feature.

2 – For those who would like to interact with others while watching the presentations, you can enter into the Gather.Town virtual world that has been created for the OHDSI2021 Symposium. You will see viewing lounges with couches and TVs to watch the webinar. Further details on Gather.Town will be posted as part of the Collaborator Showcase.