The OMOP Common Date Model has been selected as one of three new Global Goods, gaining recognition as one of the top digital health tools for data interoperability to support the digital transformation efforts of countries across the world. 

The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (OMOP CDM), an OHDSI open community data standard designed to standardize the structure and content of observational data and enable efficient analyses that can produce reliable evidence, is one of 45 Global Goods — digital health tools that are adaptable to different countries and contexts to help address key health system challenges — recognized by Digital Square at PATH.

Cynthia Sung

“We are very excited that Digital Square recognizes that the OMOP CDM is a tool that can improve healthcare around the world,” said Cynthia Sung, Adjunct Associate Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School and the 2023 OHDSI Titan Award recipient for Community Collaboration. “OHDSI’s mission is to improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care. The OMOP CDM is critical to that mission. Nearly one billion unique anonymized patient records from 49 different countries exist in an OMOP CDM, which allows for researchers to generate robust and reliable real-world evidence in a distributed network.

Digital Square aims to strengthen country efforts to develop national digital health infrastructure and ensures these efforts are supported by coordinated investments and a selection of high-quality digital health tools.

“Many low and middle-income countries are aiming to create an ecosystem of digitized health data to create more efficient systems for generating and sharing knowledge on health services utilization and outcomes,” said Sung, who co-leads the OHDSI Africa Regional Chapter, one of several regional teams and country nodes that span across six continents. “The transformation of these often-siloed repositories to an internationally recognized standard like the OMOP CDM will accelerate the effort towards interoperability.”

Digital Square works with Ministries of Health to align adaptable, interoperable digital technologies with local health needs and brings partners together to improve how the global community designs, uses, and pays for digital health tools and approaches.

Andrew Kanter

“The OMOP CDM gives Ministries of Health and other stakeholders an important tool to work alongside existing standards and other digital public goods such as OpenHIE, FHIR, and Open Concept Lab (OCL) in building a strong national, regional and even global health information ecosystem,” said Andrew Kanter, Assistant Professor of Clinical Biomedical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at Columbia University and an expert on health data systems in low-resourced countries. “Empowering global health systems with the ability to collect, standardize and share healthcare data is a necessary step to ensuring equitable healthcare around the world.”

The OMOP CDM source code and user documentation are freely available and used by over 3700 collaborators in 83 countries, as well as prominent governmental organizations such as the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and South Korea’s Health Insurance Review Authority (HIRA).

There are multiple ways to learn more about the OHDSI community, OMOP and standardized tools used by the global research community, including the Book of OHDSI, the Our Journey annual report, the EHDEN Academy (a free online training and development program), YouTube tutorials, and more.

OHDSI brings together a global community of volunteers who work together to improve healthcare. Newcomers are welcome to join our 30+ workgroups or regional chapters, post in the OHDSI forums, or connect in our MS Teams environment. OHDSI hosts weekly community calls each Tuesday at 11 am ET to highlight recent or upcoming research, provide updates, showcase published studies, and more; everybody is welcome to join these calls.

If you have further questions, please reach out to contact@ohdsi.org.