2026 Global Symposium Workgroups

Morning Workgroups

Asia-Pacific Chapter: The OHDSI APAC working group will meet to accomplish the following:  Finalize key planning decisions for the upcoming OHDSI APAC Conference, including scope, priorities, and execution milestones. Align APAC working group members on roles, timelines, and readiness to ensure successful conference delivery. Review progress against current‑year APAC objectives and surface any gaps or dependencies requiring community action. Define clear, shared goals for the next year across research, training, and community engagement. Strengthening alignment between APAC priorities and the broader OHDSI global strategy to maximize regional and global impact, 8:00am-10:00am.

Early-Stage Researchers: The OHDSI Early-Stage Researchers (ESR) Workgroup activity will offer a welcoming and interactive space for ESR members of the OHDSI community to connect, share their work, and build new collaborations. The session will include networking opportunities, a review of research highlights featuring work conducted by ESRs, and the OHDSI Hebe Awards Ceremony recognizing outstanding contributions by ESRs. It will also feature a session offering practical insight into developing and funding collaborative, open-science research studies within the OHDSI community. The activity is designed to foster mentorship, celebrate emerging scholarship, and support the continued growth of the global ESR network, 8:00am-10:00am.

Eyecare & Vision Research: We will use this session to brainstorm new network study ideas and roadmap for the future, 8:00am-10:00am.

Generative AI and Foundational Models:  In this session, we will explore the transformative role of Generative AI within the OHDSI ecosystem. In this workshop, we will demonstrate cutting-edge AI integrations for observational research workflows and collaborate to shape the strategic roadmap for our future, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Geographic Information System: The OHDSI GIS Working Group will provide updates on the Gaia toolchain ecosystem, including recent developments in gaiaDB, gaiaCore, and the containerized   deployment infrastructure that enables seamless integration of geospatial data with OMOP CDM. We will also present progress on the OMOP GIS Vocabulary Package, which now encompasses vocabularies for environmental exposures, social determinants of health, and the exposome to support spatial health research.  The group will dedicate a portion of the meeting to participate in a cross-workgroup discussion on extension tables, particularly focusing on our OMOP GIS schema extensions and how they relate to broader OHDSI standardization efforts, 8:00am-10:00am.

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

Health Equity: Join us for a culmination session celebrating our multi-year collaboration while planning 2026 initiatives through an interactive workshop designed to balance showcase with future planning. The session divides into two 90-minute blocks separated by a break: Block 1 features an interactive timeline of our milestones, a gallery walk where each workstream presents their achievements visually, and synthesis discussions to identify patterns across our work; Block 2 moves to collaborative dialogue on future opportunities, democratic prioritization of potential initiatives, and individual commitment planning with peer coaching using proven methods like World Café conversations and small group rotations (no lengthy presentations—maximum 3 minutes speaking time for anyone). Please prepare one visual summary of your workstream’s journey (poster, brief, or artifacts), reflect on what conditions enabled our best work, and bring one bold research idea you’d like the group to consider. You’ll leave with a clear picture of our collective impact, democratically prioritized 2026 initiatives, and specific personal commitments with accountability partners, 8:00am-12:30pm

Industry: An open forum for OHDSI members from the pharma, biotech, and life sciences industries to collaborate and represent industry perspectives within OHDSI. The group promotes knowledge sharing, active industry participation, and engagement with data partners to advance OHDSI studies and initiatives. Participants work together to strengthen collaboration, increase visibility of OHDSI efforts, and leverage industry expertise and resources to support OHDSI’s goals, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Medical Imaging: Details to follow, 10:30am-12:30pm.

Oncology: This meeting focuses on advancing oncology data readiness, developing community solutions to improve data granularity and bringing in additional data sources, and enabling and advancing the OHDSI Oncology network to support reliable evidence generation, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Perinatal and Reproductive Health: The Perinatal and Reproductive Health Working Group brings together clinical expertise alongside multidisciplinary perspectives to advance methods, data, and evidence generation in perinatal and reproductive health. The upcoming community session will focus on learning about the work that has been underway, engaging in a focused topic discussion, and identifying opportunities for future collaboration and shared work across the group, 10:30am-12:30pm.

Phenotype Development & Evaluation:  This session will focus on using LLMs to create network-ready reusable phenotypes, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Rare DiseaseThis session will focus on discussing the progress, challenges, and current status of real-world use cases within the OMOP Common Data Model framework for rare disease research. The discussion will highlight methodological challenges commonly encountered in rare disease studies, including cohort identification, computable phenotyping, small sample sizes, and heterogeneity across diverse real-world data sources. Participants will also explore approaches to advancing the globalization of real-world evidence through standardized data models and AI-enabled methods to enable deeper insights and broader coverage of real-world data across healthcare systems. The session aims to foster collaboration and share emerging best practices for leveraging NLP, LLMs, and CDM-based analytics to strengthen rare disease research and evidence generation, 10:30am-12:30pm.

Tidy R programming with OMOP: We will present the ecosystem of packages and discuss principles; contribute to the CohortConstructor R package solving simple issues, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Vocabularies: Mapping source codes to Standard Concepts in the OHDSI Vocabulary is hard, but essential if we want to collaborate. Let’s therefore test the current level of our human concept mappers and our AI concept mappers and learn from each other! We will be mapping (samples of) source codes across different institutions to the OHDSI Vocabularies and see where OHDSI’s best human mappers outperform the artificial ones and vice versa. The AI teams are expected to prepare their systems upfront. The goal is to get a better understanding of what is required to do good mappings both manually and through LLM orchestration.   Target audience:  a) AI mapping tool developers, b) Those wanting to learn more about manual mapping, c) Experts in manual mapping, 8:00am-12:30pm.

Waveform: The Waveform Working Group will convene to discuss progress on the OMOP CDM Waveform Extension, which enables integration of physiological waveform data   (ECG, EEG, arterial blood pressure) with electronic health records for observational research, AI model development, and clinical decision support. We will   review implementation experiences from early adopter institutions, address technical challenges in ETL processes, and discuss refinements to the four-table   extension schema (waveform_occurrence, waveform_registry, waveform_channel_metadata, and waveform_feature). The session will highlight recent use cases and   gather community feedback on standardization approaches for waveform concepts within the OMOP vocabulary. Additionally, we will dedicate a portion of our   time to participate in a cross-workgroup meeting focused on extension tables, where we can share insights from our waveform extension development and learn   from other OHDSI working groups’ experiences in extending the Common Data Model, 10:30am-12:30pm

Afternoon Workgroups

Atlas/WebAPI: ATLAS is the UI to WebAPI functionality supporting data source characterization, vocabulary search, concept set building, cohort definitions, and various characterization activities.  At the hackathon, we’ll have small focus groups dedicated to some aspect of the UI or back-end where we will do live coding sessions.  By the time of the work group, we should have converted the legacy 2.x codebase to the 3.x codebase, so there will be opportunities to optimize the codebase, address current issues, and even work on improving legacy code.  Regardless of your developer experience, you are welcome to join us!,1:30pm-3:30pm.

CDM Survey: In coordination with the Psychiatry and Vocabulary workgroups we will review the best practices for mapping survey data to OMOP and then provide a use case for the participants to work through, 1:30pm-5:00pm.

Dentistry: Please join the Dentistry Workgroup as we discuss ways to improve the OHDSI community’s capabilities to study the links between oral health and systemic disease. We will be working on dental use cases, dental standards, and understanding the role of observational research in contributing to oral health, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Evidence Network Data Partners: Details to follow, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

GIS/Waveform Cross Pollination Meeting-Extension Table Status, Integration, and Approaches:  A session bringing together working groups that maintain OMOP extension tables to share experiences and align on conventions for integrating those tables alongside OMOP data. The session will also identify barriers to design, adoption, and usability of extension tables. Additionally, it will explore opportunities for cross-working group collaboration and shared efforts, advancing ongoing dialog in the CDM working group, 1:30pm-3:30pm

HADES Hackathon: This session continues from the morning, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Health Economics & Value Assessment: This session will focus on applications of economics study, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): The OHDSI NLP Workgroup will host an interactive two-hour session at the Global Symposium, bringing together members and new collaborators interested in advancing clinical natural language processing. The session will feature updates on ongoing workgroup activities, highlights of recently developed tools and resources, and some short presentations/panel discussions showcasing emerging methods and applications. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage with the community, exchange ideas, and identify opportunities for collaboration in leveraging unstructured clinical text for real-world evidence generation, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Psychiatry: In this session we will share our progress on the psychometric scales standardization; to hear your unmet needs in psychiatry research and work on potential solutions, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

Surgery and Perioperative Medicine: Details to follow, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

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

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