Korea

The Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) national administrative claims data has been mapped to the OMOP common data model for the entire Korean population during the time range of 2010-2019. While this data is not readily accessible quite yet, collaborators are working to make it available to both Korean researchers and to the global community.

The Severance Hospital group, which includes three hospitals in the Yonsei University Health System, have joined the journey with OHDSI and converted its data to the OMOP CDM.

China

Thank you to our three new co-chairs for the China Chapter, each of whom represent different universities within China: Dr. Yi Zhou (Zhongshan University), Dr. Lei Liu (Fudan University), and Dr. Hui Lv (Jiaotong University). They will lead the China Chapter (which meets the second Friday of each month at 10 am ET) on three focuses for the upcoming year: training and engagement, methods and tools, and clinical studies.

In the area of methods and tools, five volunteers have taken the lead to work on development of the Chinese vocabulary. The two main tasks are extending the currently mapped vocabulary to 6 digits, and converting a local cancer registry to OMOP.

Japan

Work is ongoing on mapping drug vocabulary to OMOP. Work is also ongoing to bring the claims data assets to OMOP as well.

Taiwan

Six different university hospitals (Chi Mei Medical Center, Chia-Yi Christian Hospital, National Taiwan University Hospital, Show Chwan Memorial Hospital, Taipei Medical University, and Tungs’ Taichung MetroHarbor Hospital) met March 16 to begin a conversation around the benefits of the OMOP CDM. Bringing six hospitals together for an interaction around OMOP is a significant milestone, so congratulations to everybody who helped start what is now ongoing discussions.

Collaborators are working on development of an OHDSI Taiwan web site, which will be shared publicly when available. There is also a focus on mapping date from the Taipei Medical University into the OMOP CDM. This effort began with a kickoff meeting last September, which included a global effort during a technical guidance online meeting. 

Australia

The Australian chapter is currently looking to complete as many as five different OMOP conversions, which includes primary care, secondary care and administrative claims. One successful completion is PBS10 to OMOP Version 5.3.1. This contains data from March 2005 – July 2020 and includes about 3 million people (roughly 10% of the Australian population) and around 300 million records.

The Australian chapter is also looking to collaborate on more clinical studies. The University of New South Wales contributed flu data from 2012-2019 for a pair of predictive modeling COVID-19 studies, while members collaborated on this study that is available via preprint while under peer review. There is ongoing collaboration in our APAC research study on hypertension (which includes representatives from each of the six APAC chapters), as well as the EUMAEUS study, which evaluates methods to monitor vaccine safety, so we will better understand how these perform when applied to COVID-19 vaccines.

The third goal for the Australia chapter is to improve data quality. This includes better understanding and extending CDM-based data quality assessments, as well as mapping Australia’s metadata and ontologies for national health and welfare metadata standards.

The Australia Webinar Series opened April 29 when Tim Churches, Georgie Kennedy and Nasreen Kadaan led a presentation on “CaVa: Populating the OMOP oncology extension directly from clinical data.”

Singapore

The Singapore Chapter is collaborating with an AI platform to build a federated learning model. This model is being supported by the OMOP CDM. Dr. Jianshu Weng is serving as the lead for this project.

The National University of Singapore and the Singapore Ministry of Health recently announced a collaboration that will lead to the Ministry of Health using the OMOP CDM as the main platform for research. This was the result of main other collaborations with national organizations around the world, which was a key resource for the National University of Singapore in its efforts to build this connection.

The Singapore Healthcare AI Datathon and Expo will take place July 10-18, 2021. More than one thousand physicians and data scientists from around the world are expected to collaborate in this event. More information is available here.