OHDSI 2025 Workgroups

Morning Workgroups

Africa Chapter: Spotlight on African Institutions Adopting OHDSI; Agenda for the OHDSI Africa Symposium, 8:00am-10:00am. 

Asia-Pacific Chapter: OHDSI APAC Symposium Planning- The purpose of this session is to continue working through the planning for the OHDSI APAC- talking through the 3 China studies, reviewing abstracts for acceptance, or other logistics needed, 8:00am-10:00am. 

Atlas/WebAPI: We will work on developing the Atlas application and will have discussion and code reviews performed to a live audience, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Common Data Model: We will continue our work together on the next version of the OMOP CDM. This will include discussions of items to include as well as hands-on work to update the code and documentation for the OMOP CDM, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Dentistry: The Dentistry Workgroup is excited to host an in-person meeting to discuss the ongoing challenges and opportunities for observational research in dentistry. The discussions will focus on improving vocabularies, schema challenges, and enabling observational research with dental data, 8:00am-10:00am.

Early-Stage Researchers: Please join the Early-Stage Researchers Working Group for our interactive networking and mentor-mentee matching event! This engaging activity provides junior OHDSI community members an invaluable opportunity to connect with seasoned mentors and peers in a welcoming, informal setting. Through guided breakout sessions and open discussion, attendees can ask questions, exchange experiences, build lasting relationships, and gain insights into navigating OHDSI resources and advancing their career trajectories, 10:30am-12:30am.

Geographic Information System (GIS): The GIS workgroup will review what we have been working on, how you can use it, and how you can help if you are interested. Specifics will include the Gaia framework and utility, on its own and in combination with the OMOP data model and opportunities to leverage and expand upon this effort. We will demonstrate expanded functionality to workflow and tools through a new example use case, 8:00am-12:30pm.

HADES Hackathon: HADES Developer Tutorial & Hackathon: HADES (Health-Analytics Data-to-Evidence Suite) is the set of R packages used in most OHDSI studies. At the hackathon, we’ll provide developers with a tutorial on working with HADES and will work in small teams on the HADES codebase to fix problems and add improvements. Anyone interested in helping out with HADES, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, is encouraged to join us, 8:00am-3:30pm.

Industry: We will meet to continue discussing how to stand up a commercial version of the OHDSI Evidence Network, spelling out the differences between the open evidence network, 10:30am-12:30pm

Latin America: The Latin America Workgroup Session will focus on presenting and discussing the current challenges in Latin America for the implementation of the OMOP common data model. The particular characteristics of the region, the technical challenges (such as mapping local vocabularies and the importance of socio-economic variables) and the non-technical challenges (stakeholder engagement, conflicts of interest, etc.) will be presented, 8:00am-10:00am.

Medical Imaging: We will be sharing our reference implementation of the imaging extension, 8:00am-10:00am.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): The OHDSI NLP workgroup invites you to an engaging 2-hour session at the Global Symposium dedicated to interactively exploring NLP in healthcare. We’ll kick off with presentations/panels showcasing recent advancements in the field. A significant portion of the session will be dedicated to open discussions surrounding the collaborative development of clinical information extraction tools within the OHDSI community. We’ll delve into challenges, best practices, and opportunities for contribution. Finally, we’ll provide updates on three ongoing research studies that are leveraging NLP for real-world evidence generation. This session is designed to foster collaboration, spark new ideas, and accelerate the progress of utilizing NLP within the OHDSI community, 10:30am-12:30pm.

Oncology: We will continue the work on assessment and improvement on the oncology data in OMOP. More details to come in the near future, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Perinatal and Reproductive Health: The Perinatal and Reproductive Health Group (PRHeG) is an interdisciplinary workgroup that aims to develop tools and standards for perinatal and reproductive health research, to foster collaborative studies within the OHDSI network and advance research in the field. The co-leaders of PRHeG will facilitate this workgroup, and we will plan specific activities during our monthly work group meetings. People with all levels of familiarity with OHDSI and with perinatal and reproductive health are welcome and encouraged to attend, 10:30am-12:30pm.

Phenotype Evaluation: Description to come, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Vocabularies: Vocabulary WG will meet to collaborate over community contributions, documentation and other Vocabularies-related issues, requests and proposals. Meeting is open to the community. Please come if you have any questions on use, content of Vocabularies or processes, 10:30am-12:30pm.

Afternoon Workgroups

CDM Survey Subgroup: Mapping Survey Data to the OMOP Common Data Model-The CDM Survey Sub-workgroup workshop welcomes anyone interested in or actively mapping survey data to the OMOP common data model (CDM). Surveys are powerful systematic data collection tools which gather critical self-reported information from respondents through questionnaires, interviews, online forms, and more. Mapping these data to the standardized OMOP CDM format allows survey data to be pooled or combined with other observational data for research purposes. In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to connect with others working at the intersection of survey methodology and the OMOP CDM. We aim to build an engaged community and provide resources to further efforts with mapping survey data. A main goal of this workshop is to discover and compile existing mapping resources, including publications, GitHub repositories, and other materials, into a centralized location. Additionally, we will begin establishing initial guiding principles and best practices by drawing on the experiences of the workshop participants. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced practitioner, this workshop offers valuable insights and collaborative opportunities to enhance your survey data mapping projects and contribute to the development of effective strategies for integrating survey data into the OMOP CDM, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Data Bricks User Group: From Zero to a Full OHDSI Stack on Databricks in 60 minutes: An Introduction to OHDSI on Databricks In this session, participants will be able to create a complete OHDSI implementation using Databricks for their Common Data Model (CDM). Participants are also invited to come and observe and learn how to create a complete OHDSI implementation using Databricks without implementing their own instance during the session. This session will cover creating an Amazon Web Services account to host your Databricks data, creating a new Databricks account and instance, creating all of the required connection strings, tokens, and other artifacts, installing and configuring Broadsea, importing and connecting to CDM data (in this case, a test dataset will be used), running OHDSI tools such as Achilles and the Data Quality Dashboard, running an example study using Strategus, and interacting with Atlas. This is a Windows based solution, Mac and other operating systems are currently not supported. Participants who would like to build their own Databricks OHDSI instance should arrive with a modern laptop running Windows 10 or better. It would also be helpful to have your AWS instance in place ahead of time, but this is not strictly required, and we will be covering how to set up AWS for Databricks during the session. Information on creating an AWS instance for Databricks is available at https://ohdsi.github.io/DatabaseOnSpark/developer-how-tos_aws_setup.html. AWS is a paid service, and you will be required to provide payment information such as a credit card. This session should incur about $5 to $10 in AWS costs. We will be using free two-week trial instances of Databricks, 1:30pm-5:00pm.

Eyecare & Vision Research: We will be discussing network studies using newly added eye exam concepts, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Evidence Network Data Partners: We will convene as a group to discuss our yearly progress, what has gone well and where we can improve as an open collaborative evidence network, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

HADES Hackathon: Continues from the morning

Health Equity: This interactive workshop will explore approaches for leveraging OMOP CDM data to address health disparities and promote equitable healthcare outcomes. Participants will engage in collaborative exercises focused on standardizing social determinants of health data elements, developing validated phenotypes for underserved populations, and implementing analytical frameworks that account for structural determinants of health. The session will showcase recent health equity use cases from the OHDSI community and provide practical guidance for incorporating equity considerations into observational research. Both newcomers and experienced OHDSI collaborators are welcome to join this hands-on session, 1:30pm-3:30pm

Medical Devices: We will connect with Medical Device WG members and discuss our key deliverables this year – the CDM draft paper, and the OHDSI book chapter. We then also discuss how to move forward with the Medical Device Terminology Standardization mission, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Psychiatry: Discuss ongoing workgroup activities including: 1) Outcomes and lessons learned from ongoing and completed studies, 2) Ideas for future potential studies, 3) Terminology improvements and need for psychiatric research, and 4) Specific cases of CDM modeling related to neuropsychiatric events, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Rare Disease: The OHDSI Rare Disease Working Group is dedicated to advancing collaborative research and methodological innovation to improve the identification, characterization, and treatment of rare diseases using real-world data. Our work focuses on leveraging the OMOP Common Data Model to enable scalable, reproducible studies across a global network of data partners. During this session, we will share recent progress, discuss ongoing projects, and explore opportunities for new collaborations. We welcome researchers, clinicians, data scientists, and all interested stakeholders to join us in shaping the future of rare disease research within the OHDSI community, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Surgery & Perioperative Medicine: The Surgery and Perioperative Medicine Work Group aims to generate real-world evidence to improve the care of surgical patients through OHDSI’s global, open-science methods and community. This year, we’ve advanced preoperative research through the development and standardization of surgical phenotypes, contributed to enhancements in OHDSI’s procedural vocabulary mappings, and built upon prior work to develop an analysis package for a large-scale incidence rate study of surgical outcomes. If you’re a clinical researcher focused on the surgical journey, a methodologist, a data partner, or an R aficionado, now is the time to bring your expertise and connections to a greenfield domain uniquely poised for network-scale clinical impact. Join our meeting to hear what we’ve accomplished, what we’re planning next, and how you can get involved, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Women of OHDSI (WoO): Empowerment/leadership speaker on a selected topic OR OHDSI Celebrities and their OHDSI Journeys Montage, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

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