WEEKLY COMMUNITY CALL MEETINGS
The FALCON (Federated Alliance for Large-scale Cancer Observational Network) Research Network is advancing real-world oncology evidence through privacy-preserving, federated health data analyses. Last week, our community gathered in Antwerp, Belgium, for a four-day collaborative Symposium on Bladder Cancer.
Join us for our Oct. 6 (11 am ET) community call as Asieh Golozar explores key takeaways, research outputs, and next steps from this global collaboration.
The DARWIN EU presentation will be rescheduled for a future date.
Everybody is invited. If you didn’t receive a call invite, please use this link to join. The call schedule and previous recordings can be found on the community calls page.
WEEKLY WORKING GROUP MEETINGS
Upcoming Workgroup Calls – OHDSI
OHDSI SHOUTOUTS
Congratulations to the team of Yuqing Feng, Martin Yi, Catherine C. Aftandilian, Melissa P. Beauchemin, Christine Cunningham, David DeStephano, Rhea K. Khurana, Emily Larimer, Jennifer Oberg, Benjamin L. May, Keith Morse, Karthik Natarajan, David Noyd, Victoria Soucek, Yujie Chen, Adam Yan, Lin Lawrence Guo, and Lillian Sung on the recent publication of Multi-Center Evaluation of Opioid Administration or Prescription in Pediatric Oncology Patients Using the OMOP CDM in Cancer Medicine.
• Congratulations to the team of Elif Inan-Eroglu, Daloha Rodriguez-Molina, Khaled Abdelgawwad, Carina Dinkel-Keuthage, Montse Soriano Gabarró, Pareen Vora, Gianmario Candore, David Vizcaya, and Katrin Manlik on the recent publication of Advancing multi-database cohort studies: lessons learned from a studyathon in a pharmaceutical company in JAMIA Open.
• Congratulations to the team of Francis Kanyike, Annet Nanungi, Harriet Dickinson, Atif Adam, James Brash, Thu Do, Caroline Otike, Michael Bogart, Alex Asiimwe, Mui Van Zandt, and Cissy Kityo Mutuluuza on the recent publication of From fragmentation to federation: multi-partner OMOP implementation in Uganda enabling global real-world evidence generation in Frontiers in Digital Health.
• Congratulations to our 2026 Titan Award nominees: ASSURE team, David Bard, Robert Barrett, Clair Blacketer, Rich Boyce, Danielle Boyce, Evanette Burrows, Cindy Cai, Carrot and Bunny Team, Cindy Chen, Pascal Coorevits, Data4Life, Scott Duvall, Noemie Elhadad, Lee Evans, Eye Care and Vision Research WG, FastOMOP, Mornin Feng, Davera Gabriel, Josh Gagne, Sarah Gasman, Lars Halvorsen, Peter Hoffmann, Christian Högberg, Michelle Hribar, Jason Hsu, Ben Illigens, Andy Kanter, Elisse Katzman, Masha Khitrun, Mack Kigada, Chungsoo Kim, Chris Knoll, Haeun (Hannah) Lee, Gaeun Lee, Renske Los, Benjamin Martin, Valentina Martufi, Mind Meets Machine, Evan Minty, Karthik Natarajan, Bill O’Brien, Sean O’Reilly, OHDSI UK organizers, Julio Oliveria, Anna Ostropolets, Woo Yeon (Jen) Park, Rowan Parry, Paul Petraro, Melanie Philofsky, Hanieh Razzaghi, Jenna Reps, Harry Reyes Nieva, Marti Sabate, Craig Sachson, Alexander Saelmans, Martijn Schuemie, Sarah Seager, Anthony Sena, Cynthia Sung, Jim Todd, Mui Van Zandt, Annelies Verbiest, Fleur Vereijken, Katia Verhamme, Ilse Vermeulen, David Vizcaya, Tom White, Qi Yang, Seng Chan You, Bingyu Zhang
OHDSI UPDATES
The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available, and it highlights the major oncology enhancements featured in the latest vocabulary refresh, shares key updates on OMOP v5.5, and spotlights community leaders Asieh Golozar and Rupa Makadia. As always, the newsletter also includes the latest community updates, publications, and presentations, and it provides the final updates as we get closer to the 2026 Global Symposium.
• Rupa Makadia is a Director in Observational Health Data Sciences at Johnson & Johnson, based in Raritan, New Jersey. Her work focuses on generating real-world evidence to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of medical products, with particular emphasis on oncology and pregnancy research. She leads the Perinatal and Reproductive Health Workgroup, fondly known as PRHeG, within the OHDSI community and contributes to methods development and network studies. Rupa holds a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Rutgers University, an MS in Biostatistics from California State University, East Bay, and a BS in Biology from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. A longtime OHDSI member, she has helped advance cross-network initiatives and research throughout the community. Rupa discusses her career journey and research interests, upcoming initiatives for the Perinatal and Reproductive Health Workgroup, the OHDSI approach and more in the latest edition of the Collaborator Spotlight.
• Registration is open for the 2026 OHDSI Canada Symposium, held Nov. 17-18 in Toronto. This two-day event will bring together researchers, clinicians and data scientists, trainees along with public sector and industry partners from across Canada and beyond to explore the growing use of the OMOP Common Data Model and OHDSI in observational health research. The event will feature a workshop day on Nov. 17 and a main conference day on Nov. 18.
• Jiwon Um , a PhD student at Yonsei University in Korea, introduced a brief survey focusing on OHDSI in the Era of Medical AI. Medical AI is reshaping how observational research evidence is generated and used. The OHDSI community has spent more than a decade building infrastructure — OMOP CDM, standardized vocabularies, federated networks, open-source methodology — that may have a distinctive role in this transition. This survey asks how you, as a member of the community, see that role and the tensions surrounding it.
• A new call for papers is open for a Journal of Biomedical Informatics special issue focusing on agentic AI for generating trustworthy Real-World Evidence (RWE). The issue seeks contributions on multi-agent collaboration and coordinated autonomy across the RWE lifecycle—such as data harmonization and causal analysis—while excluding single-task AI agents. Submissions are accepted from June 15 through November 15, 2026, with publication slated for September 2027.
OHDSI SOCIAL SHOWCASE
Research from the 2026 Europe Symposium Collaborator Showcase is being shared daily on OHDSI’s LinkedIn, X, Instagram and Bluesky social channels as part of the #OHDSISocialShowcase. Below are posters (with study leads) that are featured this week:
Monday — Genetic Validation of Evidence-Based Phenotype Refinement in EHR Data: Complementing OHDSI Tools with Biological Signal (Marika Kaakinen)
Tuesday — Structured Clinical Data Extraction from Free-Text Reports with Large Language Models (LLMs): From Benchmarking to Knowledge Graphs (Karthik Prathaban)
Wednesday — From Observational Data to Synthetic Cohorts (Alberto Labarga)
Thursday — Automated Extraction of Genomic Entities from Spanish and Catalan Clinical Notes using Active Learning (Antonio Arcas)
Friday — Characterisation of Spanish OMOP CDM Databases Through a Study-a-thon: A Federated Descriptive Study within the OHDSI Europe Spain (Angela Leis)
UPCOMING OHDSI EVENTS
Registration is open for the 2026 OHDSI Global Symposium, held Oct. 20–22 at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, N.J. You can also read more about our 11 new tutorial offerings and workgroup activities which will take place during the event.
• Registration is open for the 2026 OHDSI APAC Symposium, which will take place Nov. 13-15 at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. This will be a 3-day event, kicking off with the main conference and then including tutorials and a datathon during the weekend. Please check the event homepage for details on the agenda and collaborator showcase.
• Registration is open for the OHDSI Canada Symposium, held Nov. 17-18 in Toronto, Ont. The event will feature a workshop day on Nov. 17 and a main conference day on Nov. 18.
• The third annual OHDSI India Symposium has been scheduled for December 11th in Chennai. More details and registration information will be shared with the community as they become available.
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