The OHDSI central coordinating center facilitates collaboration by both providing a central shared infrastructure and coordinating community activities that allow individuals from diverse backgrounds, disciplinary perspectives, stakeholder representation, and geographies to come together for a common cause. The OHDSI central coordinating center is responsible for the maintenance and release of the OHDSI standardized vocabularies, an integrated biomedical ontology and knowledge resource that is made public and has been downloaded >100,000 times by more than 1,500 organizations. The OHDSI central coordinating center built and maintains a central computing environment to enable community open-source analytics development, providing an infrastructure for continuous integrating testing across multiple relational database platforms for open-source tools such as HADES and WebAPI/ATLAS. The OHDSI coordinating center also hosts servers that provide demonstration and collaboration environments to give community members opportunities to learn about OHDSI best practices and capabilities, and to apply them within their own research activities.

The OHDSI central coordinating center also organizes the annual OHDSI Global Symposium, a multi-day event that brings individuals together to share their ongoing research, learn from the community, and create new collaboration opportunities. OHDSI community communications, including weekly community calls, monthly newsletters, annual reports, our website, forums, and social media, are all led by the OHDSI central coordinating center. 

Your sponsorship funding will be used by the OHDSI central coordinating center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center to finance the expenses associated with these activities, which includes funding for vocabulary development, central computing infrastructure, and community event costs (hotel, food, audio/visual), as well as support staff for project management, communications, and administration. Because Columbia University is a non-profit organization, sponsorship can have tax benefits.   

By sponsoring the OHDSI central coordinating center, you show your support for OHDSI’s mission and help sustain our community. You also demonstrate a commitment to the principles of open science and the opportunities this brings to improve health care.