Weekly OHDSI Digest – August 11, 2025

WEEKLY COMMUNITY CALL MEETING

On August 12, we will host our annual “Meet OHDSI Newcomers” community call. If you are relatively new to the community or hope to have a bigger role, this is a great opportunity to introduce yourself. Please tell us who you are and where you work, what are your research interests, how you hope to help the community, and how OHDSI can help your own research journey. For scheduling purposes, please note your interest in taking part in this brief survey.

WEEKLY WORKING GROUP MEETINGS

Upcoming Workgroup Calls – OHDSI

OHDSI SHOUTOUTS

• Congratulations to the team of Yilu Fang, Gongbo Zhang, Fangyi Chen, George Hripcsak, Yifan Peng, Patrick Ryan, and Chunhua Weng on the publication of CLEAR: A vision to support clinical evidence lifecycle with continuous learning in JAMIA Open.

• Congratulations to the team of Shahin Hallaj, William Halfpenny, Niloofar Radgoudarzi, Michael V Boland, Swarup S Swaminathan, Sophia Y Wang, Benjamin Y Xu, Dilru C Amarasekera, Brian Stagg, Aiyin Chen, Michelle Hribar, Kaveri A Thakoor, Kerry E Goetz, Jonathan S Myers, Aaron Y Lee, Mark A Christopher, Linda M Zangwill, Robert N Weinreb, and Sally L Baxter on the publication of Gap Analysis of Standard Automated Perimetry Concept Representation in Medical Terminologies in the Journal of Glaucoma.

• Congratulations to the team of Yoshihiro Aoyagi, Masahiro Baba, Suzue Terao, Yuya Ikeda, Keiichi Nomura, and Akihiro Sato on the publication of Feasibility of Converting EMR Data to OMOP CDM and Utilizing OHDSI Analysis Tools in Japan in Studies in Health Technology and Information Volume 329: MEDINFO 2025 — Healthcare Smart × Medicine Deep.

• Congratulations to the team of Yao An Lee, Ying Lu, Jiang Bian, Jingchuan Guo, and Xing He on the publication of Transforming the Medicare Claims Data to the OMOP Common Data Model in Studies in Health Technology and Information Volume 329: MEDINFO 2025 — Healthcare Smart × Medicine Deep.

• Congratulations to the team of Yan Hu, Na Hong, Yiming Li, Xueqing Peng, Yong Chen, and Hua Xu on the publication of PheCatcher: Leveraging LLM-Generated Synthetic Data for Automated Phenotype Definition Extraction from Biomedical Literature in Studies in Health Technology and Information Volume 329: MEDINFO 2025 — Healthcare Smart × Medicine Deep.

• Congratulations to the team of Clair Blacketer, Martijn J Schuemie, Maxim Moinat, Erica A Voss, Montse Camprubi, Peter R Rijnbeek, and Patrick B Ryan on the publication of Advancing Real-World Evidence Through a Federated Health Data Network (EHDEN): Descriptive Study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

OHDSI UPDATES

The August 2025 newsletter is now available. It includes details and resources from the 2025 Europe Symposium, information and a call to action around the FHIR-to-OMOP Implementation Guide (IG), a new collaborator spotlight with Priya Desai, July publications and presentations, and plenty more.

• The CDM Survey Sub-Workgroup is relaunching the Landscape Assessment of Survey Data and the OMOP CDM, https://forms.gle/f18ufspAFT3jSYrk6 for the month of August in preparation for our workshop at the Global Symposium. If you have mapped survey data (in progress or complete) or plan to map survey data to the OMOP CDM and have not previously filled out the assessment or met with the workgroup we need you to complete the assessment so we can determine the state of surveys in OMOP and where appropriate share resources with the OHDSI community. If you have any questions or problems with access, email me at [email protected]. More information about the CDM Survey Sub-Workgroup can be found here Home · OHDSI/CdmSurveySubWg Wiki · GitHub.

• Priya Desai is a physicist by training and a data scientist at heart. As the Biomedical Informatics R&D lead of the Research IT team at Stanford University, she is passionate about the mission of building the next generation of products to leverage healthcare research and analytics. As the Product Owner for STARR, Stanford Medicine Research Data Repository, and STARR-OMOP, Stanford’s next-generation Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW), Desai is excited to be part of the vision to create a single, integrated data lake containing clinical data from different modalities, such as radiology, pathology, and bedside monitoring. Her goal is to bring clinical data from its raw state to an “analysis-ready” state and eventually make the data “self-service” in order to support the growing use of this data to derive novel insights, support patient care, and improve care quality using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches. In the latest edition of the Collaborator Spotlight, Desai discusses her career journey, the STARR-OMOP initiative, why she believes medicine mirrors astrophysics, watching her daughter enter the health data science research field, and more.

• OHDSI is now on Bluesky! You can now get updates on all community activities and see all global research through the #OHDSISocialShowcase on BlueskyOHDSI Social Showcase

• Research from both the 2024 UK Symposium and the 2025 Europe Collaborator Showcase is being shared daily on OHDSI’s LinkedInTwitter/X, Instagram and Bluesky social channels as part of the #OHDSISocialShowcase. Below are posters (with study leads) that are featured this week:

Monday — Progress and Challenges of the OHDSI Africa Chapter (Cynthia Sung, Agnes Kiragga)

Tuesday — Unlocking Real-World Evidence through Common Data Models: Challenges and Opportunities in the Italian Context (Gianluca Fabiano)

Wednesday — Novel Data-Driven Approaches for Code Recommendations and Visualization during Phenotype Evaluation (Luisa Martinez)

Thursday — “Studyathons” can catalyse rapid progress in OMOP-enabled oncology research: insights from DigiONE I3 (Xosé Fernández)

Friday — The REACT-TIA Study-a-thon: Conducting a rapid multi-database cohort study in a pharmaceutical company – Lessons learned (Elif Inan-Eroglu)

OHDSI SYMPOSIA

GLOBAL OHDSI SYMPOSIUM, Hyatt Regency, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, Oct. 7-9
• Registration for the 2025 Global Symposium including tutorials and workgroup meetings is now open! On Oct. 7th there will be an introductory tutorial during the morning session, and five advanced tutorials during the afternoon session. The plenary plus collaborator showcase will take place on Oct. 8th followed by the workgroup meetings on Oct. 9th.

OHDSI 2025 Morning Tutorials

An Introduction to the Journey from Data to Evidence Using OHDSI Lead: Erica Voss

OHDSI 2025 Afternoon Tutorials

Developing and Evaluating Your Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) Process to the OMOP Common Data Model Lead: Clair Blacketer

Using the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies for Research Lead: Anna Ostropolets

Clinical Characterization Applications to Generate Reliable Real-World Evidence Lead: Patrick Ryan

Population-Level Effect Estimation Applications to Generate Reliable Real-World Evidence Lead: George Hripcsak

Patient-Level Prediction Applications to Generate Reliable Real-World Evidence Lead: Jenna Reps

Global Symposium links:
Please Register for the Symposium Here
Please book your hotel room here – Hyatt Regency NJ
Please fill out this form if you would like to host a collaboration event Oct. 7 Morning
Symposium Homepage

The first-ever 2025 OHDSI Africa Symposium will be held Nov. 10-12 in Kampala, Uganda, and registration is open. The abstract submission deadline will be Sept. 10. Agenda details will be shared when available.

The 2025 OHDSI Asia-Pacific Symposium will be held Dec. 6-7 in Shanghai, China. The abstract submission deadline will be August 25. More details will be shared when available.

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Please continue to collaborate in our MS Teams environment, check out the OHDSI website and forums , and follow us on all platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn to get continued updates and information on everything happening in our community