The 12th annual OHDSI Global Symposium brought together more than 420 collaborators for three days of learning, sharing, and networking to help further our mission. But what exactly is the OHDSI mission, how does our community work toward it every day, and what role can you play—whether you’re a newcomer or a seasoned collaborator—in driving it forward?
Please join us for tomorrow’s community call (Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 11 am ET) for a dedicated session exploring what OHDSI is all about and how your work helps turn that shared vision into real-world impact. 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.
Community Updates
• Congratulations to the team of Daniel Izquierdo, Ever Torres Silva, Dulfary Vallejo, Jairo J Pérez, and Juan Guillermo Barrientos Gómez on the recent publication of Dataset of anonymized clinical events and notes from obstetric electronic health records for NLP in Data in Brief.
• Congratulations to the team of Danielle Boyce, Alan Premasiri, Shawn Sullivan, Beth Levine, and Fernando G Vieira on the recent publication of Registry Forge: an open-source end-to-end pipeline for patient-directed SMART on FHIR registries in JAMIA Open.
• Congratulations to the team of Annelies Verbiest, Hans Prenen, Annelies Janssens, Christof Vulsteke, Danielle Delombaerde, Laura Tack, Philip R Debruyne, Iege Bassez, Clara L Oeste, Agnes Brandtmüller, Carl Baxter, Pieterjan Debie, and Jan Vertriest on the recent publication of Real-world utilization of pembrolizumab dosing schedules in Belgium: a multi-center retrospective study using a common data model and natural language processing in the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research.
• Congratulations to the team of Giovanna Nicora, Francesca Negri, Valentina Tibollo, Alberto Malovini, Arianna Dagliati, Lucia Sacchi, Federico Sottotetti, Paola Baiardi, and Riccardo Bellazzi on the recent publication of Cross-continental generalizability of EHR foundation model: predicting length of stay in an Italian hospital using US-trained embeddings in Frontiers in Digital Health.
• Congratulations to the team of Ying Xiao, Georgina Kennedy, Rebecca L Baker, Kari J Brewer Savannah, Kristy K Brock, Elizabeth L Covington, Peter E Gabriel, Asieh Golozar, Michael Gurley, Chen Hu, Denise Manfredi, Martha M Matuszak, Katherine Mayo, Jennifer Moughan, Elizabeth A O’Meara, Christian Reich, Lois Holloway, and Charles S Mayo on the recent publication of Harmonizing Radiotherapy Data Standards: A Comparative Analysis of OMOP, CDISC, FHIR, NAACCR, and OBO Foundry with an O3-Anchored Mapping Framework in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics.
• Congratulations to our 2026 Titan Award winners:
Titan Award for Data Standards: Masha Khitrun
Titan Award for Methodological Research: Bingyu Zhang
Titan Award for Open-Source Development: Richard Boyce
Titan Award for Clinical Application: Eyecare and Vision Research WG
Titan Award for Community Leadership: Jason Hsu
Titan Award for Community Collaboration: Andrew Kanter
Titan Award for Community Support: Renske Los
• Materials from the 2026 Global Symposium will be available on the event homepage when available. Look for both the main conference talks and Collaborator Showcase posters/demos to be available by the end of October.
• The OHDSI website received a complete refresh prior to the symposium. There are new pages devoted to the work OHDSI does, as well as the similar links to community forums, workgroups, community calls, and more.
• The 2026 version of the Our Journey annual report (fifth edition) is available via PDF on the OHDSI website.
• Take any great photos at #OHDSI2026? Please share your photos from the Global Symposium! By submitting photos, you grant permission for OHDSI to use them in upcoming community communications, recaps, and promotional materials.
• 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.
Post-Symposium Voting & Feedback (open until Friday)
• Please vote for the Best Community Contribution honorees from the Collaborator Showcase.
• Please fill out our post-symposium feedback form to let us know how we did and where we can improve.
Upcoming Events
• 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.
• Registration is open for the third annual OHDSI India Symposium, held December 11 in Chennai. More details will be shared with the community as they become available.
OHDSI Social Showcase
Research from both the 2026 Europe Symposium Collaborator Showcase and the 2026 Global 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 — Separating Intelligence from Application: A Standardized Approach for AI-Driven Evidence Generation (Tom Stone)
Tuesday — High AUROC, Low stability: the kitchen-sink approach may undermine individual-level decisions (Fleur Vereijken)
Wednesday — Insights on Developing a Federated Machine Learning Prediction Model on Danish and Norwegian Colorectal Cancer Data (Samuel Wiqvist)
Thursday — Sex and Race Differences in Type 2 Diabetes Drug Initiation After Metformin (Michelle Jin)
Friday — Argos Automatic Phenotype Generator for OMOP: Phenotypes for 1000+ Medical Conditions (Griffin M Weber)