Community Calls

OHDSI Community Calls

Everybody is invited to the weekly OHDSI community call, which takes place each Tuesday at 11 am ET. These calls are meant to inform and engage our community through a variety of call formats, including community presentations, workgroup updates, breakout sessions, publication announcements, newcomer-focused sessions, and more. The upcoming schedule is available to the right.

Videos, slides and weekly updates from this year’s calls are available below. Presentations from the 2022 and 2021 community calls are also available.

Sept. 26 - Recent OHDSI Publications (Kiwuwa-Muyingo, Hardin, Callahan, Mayer, Wu)

The Sept. 26 OHDSI Community Call featured five recent published studies that featured OHDSI tools/practices or the OMOP Common Data Model. We were thankful to the respective lead authors for sharing their work:

• Sylvia Kiwuwa-Muyingo, Biostatistician, African Population and Health Research Center • Enabling data sharing and utilization for African population health data using OHDSI tools with an OMOP-common data model (Frontiers in Public Health)
• Jill Hardin, Director, Observational Health and Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development • Characteristics and treatment pathways in pediatric and adult hidradenitis suppurativa: An examination using real world data (JAAD International)
• Tiffany Callahan, Postdoctoral Researcher, IBM • Ontologizing health systems data at scale: making translational discovery a reality (NPJ Digital Medicine)
• Craig Mayer, Interdisciplinary Data Scientist, National Library of Medicine • Learning important common data elements from shared study data: The All of Us program analysis (PLoS One)
• Qiong Wu, Research Associate of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of Pennsylvania • Padé approximant meets federated learning: A nearly lossless, one-shot algorithm for evidence synthesis in distributed research networks with rare outcomes (Journal of Biomedical Informatics)

Community Updates

• We are less than four weeks away from the 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium. If you have not yet done so, please register now to assure your place at our highlight event of the year.

• Congratulations to the 93 individuals/teams who were nominated for a 2023 Titan Award (see graphic). Each year, Titan Awards are presented to members of the community who have made valuable contributions to OHDSI’s mission, vision and values. The recipients of the seven Titan Awards will be announced during the closing talk on Friday, Oct. 20 at the Global Symposium.

• Congratulations to Columbia DBMI Chair Noémie Elhadad on being selected to receive the 2023 Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics. This award will be presented at the AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium, Nov. 11-15, in New Orleans.

• Congratulations to University of Pennsylvania Professor of Biostatistics Yong Chen on being named one of the 23 new Fellows who will be inducted into the American College of Medical Informatics during the AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium, Nov. 11-15, in New Orleans.

• Congratulations to Columbia DBMI graduate and current Odysseus Director, Head of Innovation Lab, Anna Ostropolets on earning Honorable Mention in the AMIA 2023 Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Award competition: Generating Reliable and Responsive Observational Evidence: Reducing Pre-analysis Bias.

• Congratulations to Dr. Ross Williams on successfully defending his dissertation (A model, not a prophet: operationalising patient-level prediction using observational data networks) at Erasmus MC today.

• Research from the 2023 Europe Symposium Collaborator Showcase in Rotterdam can be viewed on the Europe Symposium Showcase homepage. Research is also being shared daily on OHDSI’s LinkedIn and Twitter feeds as part of the #OHDSISocialShowcase. Below are posters (with study leads) that are featured this week:

Monday – Standardizing European sarcoma registry data to the OMOP Common Data Model (Maaike van Swieten)
Tuesday – Quality Management System of the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies (Vlad Korsik)
Wednesday – A reusable method to assess the quality of the ETL process (Vittoria Ramella)
Thursday – The use of WHO ‘Watch List’ Antibiotics in Europe: a DARWIN-EU® network population-based network cohort study (Johnmary T. Arinze)
Friday – Developing a phenotype algorithm to identify natural menopausal women in secondary data: A multi-country, large-scale OHDSI network study (Siir Su Saydam)

• The agenda for the 2023 Global Symposium main conference is now available and it highlights the most diverse agenda in our event history. It lists the full schedule for all three days, descriptions on the various weekend activities, and all 137 posters and 24 software demos that will be presented during the collaborator showcase.

• The new Community Dashboard is now available on OHDSI.org. The dashboard includes tracking sites for publications, YouTube videos, EHDEN Academy courses, network studies, the phenotype explorer, and opportunities.

HADES Development Announcements

• Jamie Gilbert announced the release of CohortDiagnostics version 3.2.4. This is a hotfix to
support newer versions of OhdsiShinyModules which have a minor API change.

• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.16.0. This includes various minor bugfixes and updates.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J. Below are all the critical links you will need for the weekend.

Job Postings

• Ajit Londhe recently posted that Boehringer Ingelheim is hiring for two positions: (1) Director, Real World Data & Analytics – Data Domain Owner (this position will lead acquisition strategy for real-world data sources for possible in-license/ purchase and additional analytical tools for in-house analytic needs across the organization … responsible for oversight of operational governance tasks & real-world data life cycle governance … US-based, remote location); and (2) Real World Evidence Data Engineer (IT position supporting RWE teams’ technology needs, including OHDSI stack support … based in Spain only).

• Yuan Lu, Assistant Professor at Yale University, announced an opening for a Postdoctoral Associate/Data Analyst at the Yale University School of Medicine. This person will work on the LEGEND Hypertension Project. More information, including job description, key responsibilities and qualifications, are available here. If interested, please reach out to Dr. Lu at y.lu@yale.edu.

Slides

Presentations: Hardin | Callahan | Mayer | Wu | Community Updates

Video Presentation

Enabling data sharing and utilization for African population health data using OHDSI tools with an OMOP-common data model (Frontiers in Public Health)

Characteristics and treatment pathways in pediatric and adult hidradenitis suppurativa: An examination using real world data (Jill Harden)

Ontologizing health systems data at scale: making translational discovery a reality (Tiffany Callahan)

Learning important common data elements from shared study data: The All of Us program analysis (Craig Mayer)

Padé approximant meets federated learning: A nearly lossless, one-shot algorithm for evidence synthesis in distributed research networks with rare outcomes (Qiong Wu)

Sept. 19 - Journal Club: 11th Revision of the ENCePP Guide on Methodological Standards in Pharmacoepidemiology

The Sept. 19 OHDSI Community Call featured a ‘Journal Club’ session focused on the 11th Revision of the ENCePP Guide on Methodological Standards in Pharmacoepidemiology. We were excited to welcome ENCePP editor Catherine Cohet and seven authors of the July 2023 revision to discuss the purpose and audience of the guide, some of the specific focuses within this revision, and how it can benefit the research mission of the OHDSI community.

You can find the current ENCePP guide here: https://www.encepp.eu/standards_and_guidances/methodologicalGuide.shtml.

We welcomed the following speakers to this session:
• Catherine Cohet, Pharmacoepidemiology Senior Specialist, RWE Workstream, Data Analytics & Methods Task Force, European Medicines Agency • Co-Chair of the ENCePP Steering Group and Editor of the Guide
• Xintong Li, DPhil student in Medical Statistics and Clinical Epidemiology, University of Oxford
• Kim López Güell, DPhil student in Medical Statistics and Clinical Epidemiology, University of Oxford
• Daniel Morales, Senior Pharmacoepidemiologist, European Medicines Agency
• Niklas Norén, Chief Science Officer, Uppsala Centre
• Luis Pinheiro, Senior Epidemiology Expert, European Medicines Agency
• Albert Prats-Uribe, Senior Clinical Researcher and Public Health Specialist, University of Oxford
• Dani Prieto-Alhambra, Section Head – Health Data Sciences, Botnar Research Centre and Professor, University of Oxford and Erasmus MC

Community Updates

• We are less than five weeks away from the 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium. If you have not yet done so, please register now to assure your place at our highlight event of the year.

• Congratulations to the team of Rowdy de Groot, Daniel Püttmann, Lucas Fleuren, Patrick Thoral, Paul Elbers, Nicolette de Keizer, Ronald Cornet; and the Dutch ICU Data Sharing Against COVID-19 Collaborators on the publication of Determining and assessing characteristics of data element names impacting the performance of annotation using Usagi in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Suehyun Lee, Hyunah Shin, Seon Choe, Min-Gyu Kang, Sae-Hoon Kim, Dong Yoon Kang, and Ju Han Kim on the publication of MetaLAB-HOI: Template standardization of health outcomes enable massive and accurate detection of adverse drug reactions from electronic health records in Pharmacoepidemiology & Drug Safety.

• Congratulations to the team of Berta Raventós, Sergio Fernández-Bertolín, María Aragón, Erica Voss, Clair Blacketer, Leonardo Méndez-Boo, Martina Recalde, Elena Roel, Andrea Pistillo, Carlen Reyes, Sebastiaan van Sandijk, Lars Halvorsen, Peter Rijnbeek, Edward Burn, and Talita Duarte-Salles on the publication of Transforming the Information System for Research in Primary Care (SIDIAP) in Catalonia to the OMOP Common Data Model and Its Use for COVID-19 Research in Clinical Epidemiology.

Monday – Roadmap and improvement of OHDSI Vocabularies (Alexander Davydov)
Tuesday – OMOP for oncology data: a single-centre and network perspective (Stelios Theophanous)
Wednesday – Evaluation of treatment effect heterogeneity in the LEGEND-Hypertension study (Alexandros Rekkas)
Thursday – The use of contraception in females with underlying conditions (Emma Lippens & Victor Pera)
Friday – IncidencePrevalence: An R package to calculate population-level incidence and prevalence rates using the OMOP Common Data Model (Martí Català)

• The OHDSI Global Symposium will host our first ever ‘OHDSI Got Talent’ event. As with the popular television series, we will have a series of contestants perform 4-6 minute routines to showcase their talent, and a panel of judges will share their thoughts on what they have seen. The OHDSI community will vote for their favorite and we will crown a winner! Do you sing or play a musical instrument? Do you dance? Can you do magic or comedy? Do you have some other unique skill that you can demonstrate in 6 minutes or less? We want to see it! If you are interested in participating, please fill out this form. The deadline to submit this form is 8pm ET on Friday, September 22; you will be notified of your acceptance by Friday, September 29.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

Slides

Community Updates

Video Presentation

Sept. 12: OHDSI 2023 Global Symposium Preview

The Sept. 12 Community Call provided a full preview of the 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium weekend. We went through the agenda for the main conference, which brings together more than 35 community members from around the world for an event that will include a plenary on “Improving the reliability and scale of case validation,” a panel session on “Lessons learned from OHDSI network studies,” 10 lightning talks, a look at the state of the OHDSI community, and plenty more. We also looked at the various weekend activities, including an introductory tutorial, the HowOften workshop, workgroup activities, and the HL7 FHIR-OMOP Connectathon.

If you have not yet registered for the OHDSI Symposium, please do so here.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Cindy Cai, William Halfpenny, Michael Boland, Harold Lehmann, Michelle Hribar, Kerry Goetz, and Sally Baxter on the publication of Advancing toward a common data model in ophthalmology: gap analysis of general eye examination concepts to standard OMOP concepts in Ophthalmology Science.

• Congratulations to the team of Mareike Przysucha, Jens Hüsers, Daniil Liberman, Oliver Kersten, Aphrodite Schlüter, Sebastian Fraas, Dorothee Busch, Maurice Moelleken, Cornelia Erfurt-Berge, Joachim Dissemond, and Ursula Hübner on the publication of Design and Implementation of an ETL-Process to Transfer Wound-Related Data into a Standardized Common Data Model in Studies in Health Technology and Informatics: Volume 307.

• We are less than six weeks away from the 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium. If you have not yet done so, please register now to assure your place at our highlight event of the year.

• This is the FINAL WEEK to contribute to the Phenotype Library for the OHDSI2023 HowOften Workshop. If you are planning to contribute, the deadline is Friday, Sept. 15. Learn more about the event and what is needed beforehand in this forum post.

• This is also the FINAL WEEK to nominate a member of the community for an OHDSI Titan Award. To recognize OHDSI collaborators (or collaborating institutions) for their contributions towards OHDSI’s mission, the OHDSI Titan Awards were introduced at the 2018 Symposium and have been handed out at the U.S./Global Symposium each year since. You can nominate a community member for a 2023 Titan Award here; the deadline is Friday, Sept. 15.

Monday – The EHDEN Portal – Simplifying the access to OMOP CDM databases (João Rafael Almeida)
Tuesday – Construction of a central ontology platform for semantic mapping coordination and vocabulary augmentation across a multi-partner oncology consortium (Jared Houghtaling)
Wednesday – The DigiONE FORGE Approach to Providing OMOP Oncology Data for Federated Analyses (Daniel Maier)
Thursday – Vaccine effectiveness to prevent long COVID: A staggered cohort study using primary care electronic health records from the United Kingdom (Martí Català)
Friday – Comparing concepts extracted from clinical Dutch text to conditions in the structured data (Tom Seinen)

• The agenda for the 2023 Global Symposium main conference is now available and it highlights the most diverse agenda in our event history. More than 35 community members from around the world will help put together an event that will include a plenary on “Improving the reliability and scale of case validation,” a panel session on “Lessons learned from OHDSI network studies,” 10 lightning talks, a look at the state of the OHDSI community, and plenty more.

• You can now register for tutorials, workshops and workgroup meetings during the Global Symposium weekend of Oct. 20-22 at the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in New Jersey, USA.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

Slides

Symposium Preview & Community Updates

Video Presentation

Sept. 5: DARWIN EU® Progress and Roadmap (Rijnbeek, Burn, Verdamme)

The Sept. 5 OHDSI Community Call provided a look at the DARWIN EU® Progress and Roadmap. DARWIN EU® is an initiative that works to deliver real-world evidence from across Europe on diseases, populations and the uses and performance of medicines. Members of the leadership team provided an update on both its progress and goals:

• Peter Rijnbeek (Professor of Medical Informatics and Chair, Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC)
• Katia Verhamme (Associate Professor of Use and Analysis of Observational Data, Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC)
• Ed Burn (Senior Researcher in Epidemiology and Health Economics, University of Oxford)

Community Updates

If you have not registered for the symposium, please do so!

• Clair Blacketer developed and shared the 2023 OMOP CDM Survey, which will be used to build our list of databases currently using the OMOP CDM and Standard Vocabularies. This is a very brief survey, and it will help OHDSI understand the range and reach of the OMOP CDM. Please fill this out by Sept. 8 so all databases can be added to the 2023 edition of Our Journey!

• The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available. It includes information on the Global Symposium, details on the latest vocabulary release, all community publications and presentations from August, and plenty more.

• Asiyah Lin, who has worked with US federal agencies at the FDA and NIH, initiated the Medical Device WG together with Vojtech Huser in the fall of 2019 with a goal of growing a community for all people who are interested in using and expanding OHDSI tools and standards for medical device related research. Asiyah discusses her career journey, some of the exciting breakthroughs in the area of biomedical ontology, the collaboration between OHDSI and the FDA, and more in the latest edition of the Collaborator Spotlight.

• The deadline to contribute to the Phenotype Library for the OHDSI2023 HowOften Workshop is Sept. 15. Learn more about the event and what is needed beforehand in this forum post.

• Congratulations to the team of Torunn Sivesind, Ani Oganesyan, Grace Bosma, Camille Hochheimer, Lisa Schilling, and Robert Dellavalle on the publication of Prescribing Patterns of Dupilumab for Atopic Dermatitis in Adults: Retrospective, Observational Cohort Study in JMIR Dermatology.

• All presentations from the 2023 OHDSI Europe Symposium are now available on the symposium homepage. These include a presentation on European Initiatives Using the OMOP CDM, a session on OMOP Oncology: Paving the Way for Patient-Centric Cancer Care, and a series of rapid-fire presentations.

• All presentations from the 2023 OHDSI APAC Symposium are now available on the symposium homepage. These include a presentation on Transforming health: What do regulators, clinicians, and consumers really want to know about healthcare and how can OHDSI help, a session on Real-World Evidence Use in Medicines Regulation that focuses on DARWIN EU®, and a series of lightning talks.

Monday – Community Contribution to the OHDSI Vocabularies, User-Level QA and a New Entity Mapping System SSSOM (Oleg Zhuk)
Tuesday – DARWIN EU®: Assessing the data quality at data partner onboarding (Sofia Bazakou)
Wednesday – Drug utilisation of valproate-containing medicinal products in women of childbearing age: a network study part of DARWIN EU® (Albert Prats-Uribe)
Thursday – Are scaphoid fractures osteoporotic? (Yonathan Schwarcz)
Friday – Software demonstration for PatientProfiles: an R package for patient characterisation based on pre-defined phenotypes and cohorts (Mike Du)

• Titan Award nominations are now open. To recognize OHDSI collaborators (or collaborating institutions) for their contributions towards OHDSI’s mission, the OHDSI Titan Awards were introduced at the 2018 Symposium and have been handed out at the U.S./Global Symposium each year since. You can nominate a community member for a 2023 Titan Award now; the deadline is Sept. 15, 2023.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

• Yuan Lu, Assistant Professor at Yale University, announced an opening for a Postdoctoral Associate/Data Analyst at the Yale University School of Medicine. This person will work on the LEGEND Hypertension Project. More information, including job description, key responsibilities and qualifications, are available here. If interested, please reach out to Dr. Lu at y.lu@yale.edu.

Slides

DARWIN EU | Community Updates

Video Presentation

Aug. 29: Update on OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies (Davydov, Ostropolets, Reich, Zhuk)

The Aug. 29 community call featured an update on OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies, including discussion around the upcoming (end August/early September) release and discussion around community contributions. This session was led by:
• Alexander Davydov (Vocabulary Team Lead, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
• Anna Ostropolets (Director, Head of the Innovation Lab, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
• Oleg Zhuk (Vocabulary Tech Lead, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
• Christian Reich (Professor of Practice, Northeastern University)

Community Updates

• The deadline to contribute to the Phenotype Library for the OHDSI2023 HowOften Workshop is Sept. 15. Learn more about the event and what is needed beforehand in this forum post.

• Congratulations to the team of Qiong Wu, Martijn J. Schuemie, Marc A. Suchard, Patrick Ryan, George M. Hripcsak, Charles A. Rohde, and Yong Chen on the publication of Padé approximant meets federated learning: A nearly lossless, one-shot algorithm for evidence synthesis in distributed research networks with rare outcomes in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Madeline J Adelman, Torunn E Sivesind, Isaac Weber, Grace Bosma, Camille Hochheimer, Chante Karimkhani, Lisa M Schilling, John S Barbieri, and Robert P Dellavalle on the publication of Prescribing Patterns of Oral Antibiotics and Isotretinoin for Acne in a Colorado Hospital System: Retrospective Cohort Study in JMIR Dermatology.

• Congratulations to the team of Elisa Henke, Yuan Peng, Ines Reinecke, Michéle Zoch, Martin Sedlmayr, and Franziska Bathelt on the publication of An Extract-Transform-Load Process Design for the Incremental Loading of German Real-World Data Based on FHIR and OMOP CDM: Algorithm Development and Validation in JMIR Medical Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Jasmin Carus, Leona Trübe, Philip Szczepanski, Sylvia Nürnberg, Hanna Hees, Stefan Bartels, Alice Nennecke, Frank Ückert, and Christopher Gundler on the publication of Mapping the Oncological Basis Dataset to the Standardized Vocabularies of a Common Data Model: A Feasibility Study in Cancers.

Monday – Automatic Data Import from OMOP to REDCap (Matteo Gabetta)
Tuesday – European Health Data & Evidence Network – Learnings from Building out a Standardized International Health Data Network (Erica Voss)
Wednesday – Extending OMOP-CDM for registering tomography imaging metadata and subsequent annotation and curation processes (Varvara Kalokyri)
Thursday – Short-, medium-, and long-term psychiatric and neuropsychiatric consequences of COVID-19: A multinational pilot study (Yi Chai)
Friday – PlasmodeSim: R package to simulate data with known treatment assignment and outcome generating processes (Gidius van de Kamp)

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

• Clark Evans shared an opening at Tufts CTSI, which seeks a Project Manager to help us coordinate an international Oncology Network using OHDSI tooling. This role includes extensive online communication, frequent documentation authoring and editing, diagramming critical dataflows, understanding of relevant health technologies, and learning the nuances of oncology research. Besides this oncology network, you will also be engaging with Tufts medical researchers, satisfying their research data requests when paired with a database expert. This query mediation role requires documentation of researcher needs, attention to technical details, knowledge of OHDSI tools, as well as project tracking and coordination.’ More information is available here.

• Frank DeFalco posted an opening for an Janssen Research & Development for an Associate Director, Observational Health Data Analytics – Global Epidemiology. This position will work closely with colleagues within the Epidemiology department. Among other primary responsibilities, this position will be expected to contribute with minimal supervision to the successful delivery of observational analyses for clinical characterization, population-level effect estimation, and patient-level prediction to meet the needs of J&J’s scientific and business functions. More information is available here.

Slides

Update on Standardized Vocabularies | Community Updates

Video Presentation

Aug. 22: OHDSI and Clinical Registries: Sanity for Health Systems (Nagy, Willett, Weaver, Evans)

The Aug. 22 community call featured a session focused on OHDSI and Clinical Registries: Sanity for Health Systems. It discussed how clinical registries can scale by using EHR automation and standardization by using the OMOP data model. Experiences with the Cure ID clinical registry on efforts to lower the effort to ETL EHR data into OMOP were shared, as well as getting more value for health systems by deploying OHDSI software within their clinical research environments. There were also brief presentations around experiences from Emory and UT Southwestern to build capacity for OHDSI in their organization.

This session was led by:

• Paul Nagy, Program Director for Graduate Training in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Deputy Director of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center
• DuWayne Willett, Chief Medical Informatics Officer, University of Texas Southwestern Health System
• Jeff Weaver, Director of Data Solutions for Emory University
• Lee Evans, Founder, LTS Computing LLC

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Madeline Adelman, Torunn Sivesind, Isaac Weber, Grace Bosma, Camille Hochheimer, Chante Karimkhani, Lisa Schilling, John Barbieri, Robert Dellavalle on the publication of Prescribing Patterns of Oral Antibiotics and Isotretinoin for Acne in a Colorado Hospital System: Retrospective Cohort Study in JMIR Dermatology.

• Research from the 2023 Europe Symposium is now available on OHDSI.org. Posters from the recent Collaborator Showcase in Rotterdam can now be viewed on the Europe Symposium Showcase homepage. Research is also being shared daily on OHDSI’s LinkedIn and Twitter feeds as part of the #OHDSISocialShowcase. Below are posters (with study leads) being featured this week:

Monday – Measuring multimorbidity in IPCI: An analysis of more than 1.8 million patients (Solomon Ioannou)
Tuesday – A Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) Workshop for OHDSI Europe (Nicolas Matentzoglu)
Wednesday – Transforming EBMT Registry to the OMOP Common Data Model (Maria Paula Busto)
Thursday – A new route of administration hierarchy derived from dose forms supporting standardised drug dose calculations (Theresa Burkard)
Friday – Pattern of long COVID symptoms and conditions: clustering analysis based on large multinational cohorts as part of an EHDEN Study-A-Thon (Kim López-Güell and Martí Català)

• The deadline to contribute to the Phenotype Library for the OHDSI2023 HowOften Workshop is Sept. 15. Learn more about the event and what is needed beforehand in this forum post.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

Slides

OHDSI and Clinical Registries | Community Updates

Video Presentation (Nagy, Willett, Weaver, Evans)

Aug. 15: Next Steps for HowOften (Ryan, Hripcsak, Rao)

The Aug. 15 community call featured a session focused on the Next Steps for HowOften. During the 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium, there will be a full session on HowOften, which was discussed during the June 20 community call (watch that talk here). In order to set ourselves up for success during that October weekend, there is early work that needs to be done. Following a presentation from Patrick Ryan and Gowtham Rao, there were smaller breakouts to discuss the evidence generated by HowOften and phenotypes needed to generate that evidence.

Community Updates

Monday – Interpretable decision rules for patient-level prediction with EXPLORE (Aniek Markus)
Tuesday – Characteristics and outcomes of over a million inflammatory bowel disease subjects in seven countries: a multinational cohort study (Chen Yanover)
Wednesday – Generating Synthetic Data from OMOP-CDM databases for Health Applications (Alberto Labarga)
Thursday – Building a European cancer OMOP network in hospitals with limited OMOP experience using tiered and modular protocolised research (Piers Mahon)
Friday – Multi-site Cost-effectiveness and Markov Chain analysis of heart failure (Markus Haug)

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

Slides

HowOften | Community Updates

Video Presentation (Ryan, Rao)

Aug. 8: Newcomer Introductions

The Aug. 8 community call welcomed new community members and provided an opportunity for anybody to introduce themselves, share why they joined the community and how OHDSI can help them. It was exciting to hear from so many new collaborators!

Community Updates

Monday – ARACHNE Execution Engine – Next Generation: Adaptive runtime environment to run federated studies (Sergey Suvorov)
Tuesday – Oslo University Hospital Participation in a European Cancer OMOP Network (Olivier Bouissou)
Wednesday – Development of an OMOP Ontology Application – PROSA – for creation and maintenance of highly granular source concepts within the OMOP vocabulary structure (Jared Houghtaling)
Thursday – Facilitating Global Understanding of Tixagevimab/Cilgavimab Use: Leveraging OMOP Common Data Model for Harmonized Data Extraction and Federated Network Creation (Yuval Koren)
Friday – Deep Learning Comparison (LH John)

• The August edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available. It includes recaps of the Europe and Asia-Pacific Symposiums, all publications and presentations from July, the monthly video podcast, updates and more.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

• Clark Evans shared an opening at Tufts CTSI, which ‘seeks a Project Manager to help us coordinate an international Oncology Network using OHDSI tooling. This role includes extensive online communication, frequent documentation authoring and editing, diagramming critical dataflows, understanding of relevant health technologies, and learning the nuances of oncology research. Besides this oncology network, you will also be engaging with Tufts medical researchers, satisfying their research data requests when paired with a database expert. This query mediation role requires documentation of researcher needs, attention to technical details, knowledge of OHDSI tools, as well as project tracking and coordination.’ More information is available here.

Aug. 1: OMOP on CQL on FHIR: The Intersection of Interoperability Standards & Digital Quality (Hamlin, Houghtaling, Evans)

The Aug. 1 community call featured a presentation and Q&A on “OMOP on CQL on FHIR: The Intersection of Interoperability Standards and Digital Quality.” This session included talks on evaluating dQM Cohort definitions as OMOP Phenotypes, CQL/OMOP, and dQMs in practice — the LAISDAR Project. This meeting was was led by:

• Ben Hamlin (Senior Research Informaticist, Quality Measurement and Research Group, National Committee for Quality Assurance)
• Jared Houghtaling (Software Development Analyst, Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute)
• Clark Evans (Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute)

Community Updates

• Next week’s community call will be our annual “Newcomer Introductions” session. If you are new to the community, please join this call to introduce yourself, tell us why you have joined the community, and how OHDSI can help your research interests. If you would like to register to introduce yourself, please fill out this brief form so we can include everybody.

• Congratulations to the team of Yu Jeong Lee, Jinmi Kim, Youngmi Han, Kyuhyun Hwang, Byungkwan Choi, Tae Ryom Oh, Il Young Kim, and Harin Rhee on the publication of Risk of Hyponatremia after Tramadol/Acetaminophen Single-Pill Combination Therapy: A Real-World Study Based on the OMOP-CDM Database in Drugs in R&D.

Monday – Development of a GA4GH Beacon for structured Clinical Data Discovery using the OMOP-CDM (Sergi Aguiló-Castillo, Alberto Labarga)
Tuesday – Creation of a reusable OMOP transformation workflow for Belgian electronic health record systems (Jared Houghtaling)
Wednesday – NNRD-AI: a national neonatal research database for rapid insights with machine learning and artificial intelligence (Julia Lanoue)
Thursday – OMOP-CDM Data conversion for the Papageorgiou General Hospital in Greece (Pantelis Natsiavas)
Friday –Application of the R-CDM extension to capture metadata and features extracted from quantitative brain MRI and CT data (Jelle Praet)

• Davera Gabriel, an inaugural chair of the HL7 Terminology Services Management Group, co-leads the OMOP + FHIR Working Group, and is focused on ways to strengthen the partnership between OHDSI and HL7/FHIR, including through a full-day event at the 2023 Global Symposium. In the latest edition of the Collaborator Spotlight, Davera talks about her career journey, why OMOP is an ideal partner for the FHIR community, lessons learned as part of the N3C community, the HL7 FHIR-OMOP Connectathon, and plenty more.

HADES Development Announcements

• Katy Sadowski announced the release of DataQualityDashboard 2.4.0. The main change in this release is a set of fixes to the threshold files to correct some erroneous failure thresholds and outdated plausible unit concept ID lists. Dmitry Dymshyts contributed the threshold fixes. Please visit the Changelog for more detail on the changes.

• Joel Swerdel announced the release of PheValuator 2.2.9. It allows for using a cohort to specifically designate cases for determining true and false negatives and positives. It also adds functionality for determining raw and corrected incidence proportion and incidence rates. The new version provides the complete set of output csv files for manually reading or for use within shiny.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

Job Postings

• Evan Phelps shared an opening at UC San Francisco for an experienced ETL Developer / Health Data Analyst on my Research Data Assets team at UCSF. While this position will not initially be focused solely on OMOP, we have a growing focus in that direction, and I’d love to see some applicants from the OHDSI community. This is a full-time, permanent position on a team that primarily works remotely, so relocation would not be required if you already live within the United States. More information is available on this post or on the application link.

• There is an opening with IQVIA for an OMOP Data Analyst. Job overview: Under broad guidance, performs data analytics activities related to complex business problems and issues to provide insight to decision makers. May provide analytic support for internal project teams and for external client consulting or services engagements. You can find the full posting and apply here.

• Ajit Londhe shared a recent forum post announcing a position for Senior Associate Director, Real World Data & Analytics at Boehringer Ingelheim. The purpose of this position is to: generate real world evidence (RWE) to support in-line and pipeline products; provide statistical advice on the analysis of real world data (RWD) to various internal and external stakeholders; contribute to the RWD acquisition strategy and tool evaluation; and participate in the development and presentation of RWE trainings. More information and an application link are available here.

• Dina Gifkins also posted an opening on the forums for the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology, at Janssen Research & Development. Among the primary responsibilities would be to: assist with identifying research study needs, drafting proposals and protocols, and contributing to epidemiology and real world data strategy and study conduct across the clinical development program; conduct literature reviews and synthesis; provide assistance to clinical teams with study design; and identify and evaluate data resources to meet therapeutic needs; and work closely with other colleagues in the Epidemiology department when defining research questions, developing epidemiological protocols, and implementing solutions. More information and an application link are available here.

• Andrew Williams announced an opening for a Software Developer Analyst II at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This position will be responsible for executing software development initiatives, including collaborating with various stakeholders to understand requirements and design solutions, evaluating options and developing technical designs, and developing solution using appropriate programming language and/or technical tools.

• Noémie Elhadad shared that the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is seeking exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.

Slides

OMOP on CQL on FHIR | Community Updates

Video Presentation

July 25: Around the Asia-Pacific (APAC) Region (Hsu, Liu, Pratt, Hiramatsu, Feng, Kim)

The July 25 community call provided updates on the research and activities happening around the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. We heard from six regional chapter leads with updates on local and global progress happening within our community:

• Jason Hsu (Taiwan Chapter)
• Lei Liu (China Chapter)
• Nicole Pratt (Australia Chapter)
• Tatsuo Hiramatsu (Japan Chapter)
• Mengling ‘Mornin’ Feng (Singapore Chapter)
• Chungsoo Kim (Korea Chapter)

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of David Oniani, Bambang Parmanto, Andi Saptono, Allyn Bove, Janet Freburger, Shyam Visweswaran, Nickie Cappella, Brian McLay, Jonathan C Silverstein, Michael Becich, Anthony Delitto, Elizabeth Skidmore, and Yanshan Wang on the publication of ReDWINE: A clinical datamart with text analytical capabilities to facilitate rehabilitation research in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

July 20 – Integrating the OMOP CDM into the AI Sandbox of the German Health Data Lab (Melissa Finster)
July 21 – The Dutch ICU Data Warehouse: towards a standardized multicenter electronic health record database (Ameet Jagesar)
July 24 – Hierarchical clustering of microbial resistance profiles and ventilation protocols using the oncology extension (Jared Houghtaling)
July 25 – An Evaluation and maintenance of cohorts and concept sets the in OMOP Vocabulary Evolution (Dmytry Dymshyts)
July 26 – Mapping Data of Patients with Hematological Malignancies to the OMOP Common Data Model: A Case Study of Chronic lymphocytic Leukemia (Evangelia Minga)
July 27 – Standardization of the French national database SNDS in OMOP-CDM (Gaëlle Collumeau)
July 28 – The LAISDAR project – hospital EHR harmonization in Rwanda through mapping to OMOP CDM; outcome, challenges and lessons learned (Lars Halvorsen)

HADES Development Announcements

• James Gilbert announced the release of CohortDiagnostics 3.2.3. This is a hotfix to support executing diagnostics in an isolated manner. Previously, not running concept set diagnostics would crash the shiny app as no concept sets would be created. Please check the release notes for details of changes.

2023 OHDSI Global Symposium

• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J. Registration is open, and the call for participation has passed; we received close to 170 submissions! Check out the symposium homepage for more information and updates as we get closer to the OHDSI symposium.

On the registration link above you may sign up for the Intro to OHDSI tutorial, the HL7 FHIR-OMOP Connectathon, the ISPE-RWE for Pharmacovigilance meetings or the numerous workgroup meetings offered over the weekend; there is no sign-up required for the HowOften Workshop.

Please make sure you secure your hotel room by using the link found on the OHDSI website symposium homepage under hotel information; rooms are on a first-come, first-served basis at the special OHDSI rate.

Job Postings

Slides

Community Updates

Video Presentation

July 18: Vulcan: An HL7 FHIR Accelerator Transforming Clinical/Translational Research (van Campen, Gabriel, Glover)

The July 18 community call included a presentation on “Vulcan: An HL7 FHIR Accelerator Transforming Clinical & Translational Research.” The session was led by:

• Michael van Campen (Vulcan Program Director)
• Davera Gabriel (Director for Terminology Management, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine)
• Hugh Glover (Vulcan Technical Director)

Community Updates

• Thank you to everybody who organized, supported or took part in the 2023 Asia-Pacific Symposium, which took place July 12-13 in Sydney, Australia. Videos and research from the event will be shared when available.

• Congratulations to the team of Severin Kohler, Diego Boscá, Florian Kärcher, Birger Haarbrandt, Manuel Prinz, Michael Marschollek, and Roland Eils on the publication of Eos and OMOCL: Towards a seamless integration of openEHR records into the OMOP Common Data Model in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

• The latest collaborator spotlight focuses on Alexander Davydov, the Technical Team Lead for the Medical Vocabulary team in Odysseus Data Services. He shares how his versatile background has benefitted him in all areas of OHDSI, when and why he developed his passion for the community, and his vision for OHDSI’s standardized vocabularies.

• The India Chapter hosted its first webinar on 14 June 2023 entitled “Redefine Indian Healthcare with Real-World Data and Real-World Evidence.” You can watch the presentation here.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

• Justin Starren announced that the Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.

• The Center for Computational Life Sciences at Cleveland Clinic offers an opportunity for a visionary Senior Faculty to establish our biomedical research and healthcare system as a global leader in Artificial Intelligence Research (AI). This Senior Faculty position will shape and expand AI technologies and applications centered around biomedical science and healthcare, supported by strong institutional commitment to build their vision. More information is available here.

Slides

Vulcan | Community Updates

Video Presentation

July 11: European Symposium Review (Los, Moinat, Duarte Salles, Barboza)

The 2023 European Symposium was held July 1-3 in Rotterdam, Neth. This event included a main conference and two days of tutorials and workshops. Thank you to the following members of the Erasmus University Medical Center for providing this review:

• Renske Los (Assistant Professor of Medical Informatics, Erasmus University Medical Center)
• Talita Duarte-Salles (Senior Epidemiologist, IDIAPJGol; Assistant Professor, Erasmus University Medical Center)
• Maxim Moinat (Scientific Researcher, Erasmus University Medical Center)
• Cesar Barboza (Software Developer, Erasmus University Medical Center)

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of David Vizcaya, Csaba P Kovesdy, Andrés Reyes, Elena Pessina, Pau Pujol, Glen James, and Nikolaus G Oberprieler on the publication of Characteristics of patients with chronic kidney disease and Type 2 diabetes initiating finerenone in the USA: a multi-database, cross-sectional study in the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research.

• Congratulations to the team of Sajjad Fouladvand, Morteza Noshad, Mary Kane Goldstein, VJ Periyakoil, and Jonathan H Chen on the publication of Harmonisation of German Health Care Data Using the OMOP Common Data Model – A Practice Report in Volume 305 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Vlasios Dimitriadis, Achilleas Chytas, Margarita Grammatikopoulou, George Nikolaidis, Jenny Pliatsika, Martha Zachariadou, Spiros Nikolopoulos, and Pantelis Natsiavas on the publication of Use of Real-World Data to Support Adverse Drug Reactions Prevention During ePrescription in Volume 305 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of SooJeong Ko, Se-Hyun Chang, Yeon Woong Chung, Young-Gyun Seo, Dong-Yoon Gang, Kwangsoo Kim, Dong-Jin Chang, and In Young Choi on the publication of Investigation of hepatic adverse events due to quetiapine by using the common data model in Pharmacoepidemiology Drug Safety.

• Congratulations to the team of Jill Hardin, Rupa Makadia, Shawn Black, Irene Lara-Corrales, Lucia Diaz, Joslyn S Kirby, Cynthia M C DeKlotz on the publication of Characteristics and treatment pathways in pediatric and adult hidradenitis suppurativa: An examination using real world data in JAAS International.

• Congratulations to the team of Giorgio Gandaglia, Francesco Pellegrino, Asieh Golozar, Bertrand De Meulder, Thomas Abbott, Ariel Achtman, Muhammad Imran Omar, Thamir Alshammari, Carlos Areia, Alex Asiimwe, Katharina Beyer, Anders Bjartell, Riccardo Campi, Philip Cornford, Thomas Falconer, Qi Feng, Mengchun Gong, Ronald Herrera, Nigel Hughes, Tim Hulsen, Adam Kinnaird, Lana Lai, Gianluca Maresca, Nicolas Mottet, Marek Oja, Peter Prinsen, Christian Reich, Sebastiaan Remmers, Monique Roobol, Vasileios Sakalis, Sarah Seager, Emma Smith, Robert Snijder, Carl Steinbeisser, Nicolas Thurin, Ayman Hijazy, Kees van Bochove, Roderick Van den Bergh, Mieke Van Hemelrijck, Peter-Paul Willemse, Andrew Williams, Nazanin Zounemat Kermani, Susan Evans-Axelsson, Alberto Briganti, James N’Dow; PIONEER Consortium on the publication of Clinical Characterization of Patients Diagnosed with Prostate Cancer and Undergoing Conservative Management: A PIONEER Analysis Based on Big Data in European Urology.

• Congratulations to the team of Craig Mayer and Vojtech Huser on the publication of Learning important common data elements from shared study data: The All of Us program analysis in PLOS One.

• The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available, and it includes details of the recent work from our vocabulary team, a mid-year conversation around OHDSI’s work in vocabularies, data and open-source tools, community updates, June publications and presentations, and plenty more.

• The India Chapter hosted its first webinar on 14 June 2023 entitled “Redefine Indian Healthcare with Real-World Data and Real-World Evidence.” You can watch the presentation here.

• The agenda for the 2023 OHDSI Australia symposium has been finalized, both for the main conference (July 13) and the tutorial day (July 14). Main conference sessions include: An artisanal approach to crafting real-world evidence; A step-by-step recipe for RWE: The OHDSI Save-our-Sisyphus Challenge; Too many cooks in the kitchen is never enough: Collaborative Data Harmonisation to improve patient care; and A Smorgasbord of Health Data Insights across the APAC Region. Registration will remain open for the APAC Symposium until July 6.

HADES Development Announcements

• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of ParallelLogger 3.2.0 (should now behave much better inside try…catch blocks), SqlRender 1.15.1 (a fix for translating Circe cohort expression SQL for DuckDB), DatabaseConnector 6.2.3 (fixes the ‘missing origin’ error the previous release introduced for older R versions) and Method Evaluation 2.3.0 (supports using your own benchmark – set of negative and positive controls).

• Martin Lavallee announced the release of Ulysses v0.0.1 & v0.0.2. This is a new R package aiming to help assist in the development and organization of an OHDSI study. Users can initiate a directory structure for an OHDSI study using the function newOhdsiStudy. The OHDSI study directory can then be injected with necessary documentation such as README and NEWS. Ulysses also introduces templates for vital documentation for an OHDSI study such as a protocol template, a how to run (explains how collaborators should execute the study) and contributor guidelines. For more information on additional functions and demo please visit the package website. Martin also announced the release Capr v2.0.5. Capr updates include change query functions to match known syntax (i.e. drug => drugExposure, condition => conditionOccurrence); require a name for cs(); improve documentation (add vignette for query, count and group).

• Anthony Sena announced the release of FeatureExtraction v3.3.0. This new version supports using cohorts as covariates and adding covariates based on care_site_id. There are also a few bug fixes and updates to Java dependencies.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• The 2023 European Symposium — titled “Full Steam Ahead” — will be held July 1-3 in Rotterdam. The main conference will be held Monday, July 3, while there will be tutorials on the weekend of July 1-2. Registration is open.

Job Postings

Slides

Los | Community Updates

Video Presentation

June 27: Recent Publications (Voss, Rekkas, Williams, Keloth, Leese)

The June 27 community call featured five recent publications that have come from our community. We heard about the following studies from their respective leads:

Contextualising adverse events of special interest to characterise the baseline incidence rates in 24 million patients with COVID-19 across 26 databases: a multinational retrospective cohort study (EClinicalMedicine) • Erica Voss, Senior Director, Janssen Research & Development

A standardized framework for risk-based assessment of treatment effect heterogeneity in observational healthcare databases (NPJ Digital Medicine) • Alexandros Rekkas, PhD Student, Erasmus MC

Building the observational medical outcomes partnership’s T-MSIS Analytic File common data model (Informatics in Medicine Unlocked) • Nick Williams, Applied Clinical Informatics Branch, National Library of Medicine

Representing and utilizing clinical textual data for real world studies: An OHDSI approach (Journal of Biomedical Informatics) • Vipina Keloth, Postdoctoral Associate, Yale School of Medicine

Clinical encounter heterogeneity and methods for resolving in networked EHR data: a study from N3C and RECOVER programs (JAMIA) • Peter Leese, Program Director and Lead Scientist, University of North Carolina School of Medicine

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Faaizah Arshad, Martijn Schuemie, Fan Bu, Evan Minty, Thamir Alshammari, Lana Y. H. Lai, Talita Duarte-Salles, Stephen Fortin, Fredrik Nyberg, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra and Marc Suchard on the publication of Serially Combining Epidemiological Designs Does Not Improve Overall Signal Detection in Vaccine Safety Surveillance in Drug Safety.

• Congratulations to the team of Sajjad Fouladvand, Morteza Noshad, Mary Kane Goldstein, VJ Periyakoil, and Jonathan H Chen on the publication of Mild Cognitive Impairment: Data-Driven Prediction, Risk Factors, and Workup in the latest AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science Proceedings.

• Course director Dani Prieto-Alhambra led the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model last week, and multiple members of the OHDSI community joined as speakers and delegates from multiple stakeholders throughout the week. Thank you to everybody in the community who helped return this great educational opportunity in-person for the first time since the pandemic.

HADES Development Announcements

• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of DatabaseConnector 6.2.2. The most important changes here are improved overall performance for RedShift specifically, and improved performance for all platforms when downloading dates and datetimes.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Voss | Williams | Keloth | Leese | Community Updates

Video Presentations

Erica Voss

Alexandros Rekkas

Nick Williams

Vipina Keloth

Peter Leese

June 20: HowOften: A Large-Scale Incidence Generation Initiative (Hripcsak, Ryan)

The June 20 community call featured a presentation and discussion on HowOften, a large-scale incidence generation initiative. At the 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium in October, we will collaborate together on a full-day workshop around this concept; during this session, George Hripcsak and Patrick Ryan introduced the idea and potential benefits of HowOften, discussed some early ideas for the symposium workshop, and opened a poll to start gaining community feedback.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Ji Eun Lim, Hye Min Kim, Ju Hee Ki, Hey Sung Baek, and Man Yong Han on the publication of Association between dyslipidemia and asthma in children: A systematic review and multicenter cohort study using a common data model in Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics.

• Thank you to all community members who shared their brief reports for the 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium. We are thrilled to announce that we set ANOTHER community record with more than 160 submissions for our expanded Collaborator Showcase this October!

HADES Development Announcements

• Martin Lavallee announced the release of Capr 2.0.4. This includes a hot fix to allow procedure occurrence queries to work properly.

• Egill Fridgeirsson announced the release of DeepPatientLevelPrediction 1.1.6. This includes a new feature to store hyperparameter results for long running models so the run can be resumed if it stops for any reason.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J. Registration has opened, and the call for collaboration is open until Friday, June 16, at 8 pm ET. Check out the symposium homepage for more information and updates as we get closer to the OHDSI symposium.

Job Postings

Slides

HowOften | Community Updates

Video Presentation

June 13: ATLAS: User Input for Community Development (Anthony Sena, Christopher Knoll, Breakouts)

The June 13 OHDSI Community Call featured a session focused on ATLAS: User Input for Community Development. The meeting opened with a presentation about ATLAS, an open source application developed within the community and intended to provide a unified interface to patient level data and analytics. While the opening talk included announcements of both recent and upcoming developments, the majority of the call featured breakouts — each with one member of the ATLAS team — that sought community input on what people want to see from this tool.

Community Updates

• The OHDSI 2023 Global Symposium collaborator showcase deadline is THIS FRIDAY. All brief reports must be submitted by 8 pm EST on Friday, June 16. More information on the collaborator showcase is available here, and you can use this link to submit your brief report.

• The registration page for the Global Symposium (Oct. 20-22) now includes a full list of workshops, tutorials and workgroup activities held throughout the weekend. Please check it out and learn about all the offerings this year in East Brunswick, N.J.

• The June edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available. It contains details about the upcoming OHDSI symposiums, reflections on the SOS Challenge, community updates, 20 May publications from our community, and plenty more!

• The OHDSI India chapter will be hosting its first webinar on “Redefine Indian healthcare with Real-world data and Real-world evidence” on June 14, 2023, from 3-4 pm IST. This webinar will share the latest progress within the RWD/RWE space in India and share how collaboration with the OHDSI India chapter can transform the healthcare management landscape in India. Nicole Pratt and Vikram Patil will be among the featured speakers. If you are interested, please visit the OHDSI India homepage to register.

• EHealth Hub For Cancer is funding 5 PhD students to work on cutting-edge cancer health data science research. These fully funded PhD studentships include a tax-free stipend (with fees paid) along with expenses, and 12-month travel to partner sites and materials are available. The program is being coordinated by Aedin Culhane in the School of Medicine, University of Limerick, Ireland, and the team is looking for students with a background in statistics, epidemiologists, bioinformatics, computational biology, software engineering or a related quantitative discipline. Please see this form for more details and application information; the deadline is 15 June 2023.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

ATLAS Presentation | Community Updates

Video Presentation (Anthony Sena, Christopher Knoll)

June 6: OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies: Landscape, Roadmap & Community Contributions (Ostropolets, Davydov, Reich)

The June 6 OHDSI Community Call featured a session focused on OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies: Landscape, Roadmap & Community Contributions. Following the release of the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies Assessment, leaders from the vocabulary team presented findings and next steps, including ways to create a more transparent and reliable release cycle.

This session was led by:

• Anna Ostropolets (Director, Head of the Innovation Lab, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
• Alexander Davydov (Technical Team Lead, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
• Christian Reich (Senior Researcher, Erasmus University Medical Center; Professor of Practice, Northeastern University)

Community Updates

• The OHDSI 2023 Global Symposium collaborator showcase deadline is less than two weeks away. All brief reports must be submitted by 8 pm EST on Friday, June 16. More information on the collaborator showcase is available here, and you can use this link to submit your brief report.

• Congratulations to the team of Daniel Puttmann, Rowdy de Groot, Nicolette de Keizer, Ronald Cornet, Paul W.G. Elbers, Dave Dongelmans, Ferishta Bakhshi-Raiez, on behalf of The Dutch ICU Data Sharing Against COVID-19 Collaborators on the publication of Assessing the FAIRness of databases on the EHDEN portal: A case study on two Dutch ICU databases in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

• The latest Collaborator Spotlight features Singapore chapter lead Mengling ‘Mornin’ Feng, who recently helped develop a collaboration with the Singapore Ministry of Health that has led the Ministry to use the OMOP CDM as the main platform for research. In this spotlight, Mornin discusses his professional journey, how he connected with OHDSI, recent developments within the Singapore and APAC regions, and plenty more.

• While tutorials for the SOS Challenge have concluded, work on the studies are ongoing. Cindy Cai, who is leading the Anti-VEGF study, announced that data partners are being accepted through July 14, 2023; her interpretation on the first study results is available here. Jack Janetzki, Seng Chan You and the fluoroquinolone also provided a results interpretation session last week, and they announced that weekly meetings would continue at their regular time through the end of July. All information and tutorials from the event are available on the SOS Challenge homepage.

• The PIONEER team is leading a studyathon June 13-16 in Stockholm, Sweden, with a focus on “Observational health data analysis on the adverse events of systemic treatment in patients with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer” and is looking for participation from the OHDSI community, and specifically members of the Oncology WG. This will be a hybrid event so online participation is welcome. If you are interested in learning more, please fill out this form. PIONEER are especially looking for: collaborators with data on metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer already in the OMOP-CDM; experts with coding skills in R, SQL and Python; data analysts familiar with R and R Shiny; and epidemiologists with experience in phenotyping.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Vocabularies Presentation (slides include links mentioned during presentation) | Community Updates

Video Presentation

(Anna Ostropolets, Alexander Davydov, Christian Reich)

May 30: Collaborator Showcase Brainstorm (Small Group Breakouts)

The May 30 OHDSI Community Call provided a dedicated session on the 2023 Global Symposium collaborator showcase. After a brief discussion about the logistics of submitting your brief report, multiple sessions with small breakout groups were held to discuss submissions and brainstorm about ideas, challenges, and more.

The OHDSI 2023 Global Symposium collaborator showcase deadline is less than three weeks away. All brief reports must be submitted by 8 pm EST on Friday, June 16. More information on the collaborator showcase is available here, and you can use this link to submit your brief report.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Paul Kingsbury, Hakob Abajian, Mark Abajian, Praveen Angyan, Juan Espinoza, Beau MacDonald, Daniella Meeker, John Wilson, and Neil Bahroos on the publication of SEnDAE: A resource for expanding research into social and environmental determinants of health in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Collaborator Showcase | Community Updates

Collaborator Showcase Intro Video (Breakouts were not recorded)

May 23: SOS Challenge Week 9: Interpreting the Results (Cindy Cai)

The May 23 OHDSI Community Call provided the ninth and final discussion for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on interpreting the results generated by our Anti-VEGF study, and the session was led by study lead Cindy Cai (Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins University).

Though this was the final session, the study itself will continue into the summer. As discussed during this session, data partners can join this study through July 14, 2023.

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to OHDSI veteran Thamir Alshammari on earning the distinction of being one of the 15 new ISPE fellows for 2023. The new Fellows will be officially inducted at the Annual Members’ Meeting & Awards Ceremony scheduled for Saturday, August 26th at the Halifax Convention Center, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

• Congratulations to the team of Tiffany Callahan, Adrianne Stefanski, Jordan Wyrwa, Chenjie Zeng, Anna Ostropolets, Juan Banda, William Baumgartner Jr., Richard Boyce, Elena Casiraghi, Ben Coleman, Janine Collins, Sara Deakyne Davies, James Feinstein, Asiyah Lin, Blake Martin, Nicolas Matentzoglu, Daniella Meeker, Justin Reese, Jessica Sinclair, Sanya Taneja, Katy Trinkley, Nicole Vasilevsky, Andrew Williams, Xingmin Zhang, Joshua Denny, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, Tellen Bennett, Melissa Haendel, Peter Robinson, Lawrence Hunter & Michael Kahn on the publication of Ontologizing health systems data at scale: making translational discovery a reality in NPJ Digital Medicine.

• Congratulations to the team of Romina Blasini, Achim Michel-Backofen, Henning Schneider, and Kurt Marquardt on the publication of RD-MON – Building a Rare Disease Monitor to Enhance Awareness for Patients with Rare Diseases in Intensive Care in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Seol Whan Oh, Soo Jeong Ko, Yun Seon Im, Surin Jung, Bo Yeon Choi, Jae Yoon Kim, Wona Choi, and In Young Choi on the publication of Data Quality Assessment for Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model of Multi-Center in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Elisa Henke, Michéle Zoch, Ines Reinecke, Melissa Spoden, Thomas Ruhnke, Christian Günster, Martin Sedlmayr, and Franziska Bathelt on the publication of German Claims Data for Real-World Research: Content Coverage Evaluation in OMOP CDM in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Florian Katsch, Rada Hussein, Raffael Korntheuer, and Georg Duftschmid on the publication of Converting HL7 CDA Based Nationwide Austrian Medication Data to OMOP CDM in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Markus Haug, Raivo Kolde, Marek Oja, and Maarja Pajusalu on the publication of Modeling Patient Treatment Trajectories Using Markov Chains for Cost Analysis in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Yuan Peng, Elisa Henke, Martin Sedlmayr, and Franziska Bathelt on the publication of Towards ETL Processes to OMOP CDM Using Metadata and Modularization in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Ines Reinecke, Elisa Henke, Yuan Peng, Martin Sedlmayr, and Franziska Bathelt on the publication of Fitness for Use of Anatomical Therapeutic Classification for Real World Data Research in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

HADES Development Announcements

• Martin Lavallee announced the release of Capr 2.0.3. This release includes a trio of patch changes, including the addition of an opAttribute super Class, a new version of purrr (v1.0.1) for list_flatten bug, and an update to github workflow versions.

• Frank DeFalco announced the release of Achilles 1.7.2. Achilles, which is not available on CRAN, has been brought in line with HADES package standards.

• Katy Sadowski announced that DataQualityDashboard 2.3.0 has been released; special thanks to Thomas White and Maxim Moinat for their efforts on this release. This release contains 2 new features:

New sqlOnly option that generates SQL queries which will insert DQ check results into a database table, and which can union check SQLs for improved performance
Function to convert the keys in a DQD results JSON file between snakecase and camelcase, addressing compatibility issues caused by the camelcase migration in v2.1.0

Thank you to all of our HADES developers and maintainers for all the work they do on our community open-source tools. You can follow all development announcements on this thread.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Tutorial | Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Interpreting the Results (Cindy Cai)

May 16: SOS Challenge Week 8: Evidence Synthesis (Yong Chen, Martijn Schuemie)

The May 16 OHDSI Community Call provided the eighth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on evidence synthesis, and the session will be led by:

Yong Chen (Professor of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, University of Pennsylvania)
Martijn Schuemie (Research Fellow, Epidemiology Analytics, Janssen Research and Development)

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to Nick Williams on the publication of Building the observational medical outcomes partnership’s T-MSIS Analytic File common data model in Informatics in Medicine Unlocked.

• Congratulations to the team of Raffael Lukas Korntheuer, Florian Katsch, and Georg Duftschmid on the publication of Transforming Documents of the Austrian Nationwide EHR System into the OMOP CDM in Vol. 301 of Studies in Health Technology and Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Emmanuelle Kempf, Morgan Vaterkowski, Damien Leprovost, Nicolas Griffon, David Ouagne, Stéphane Breant, Patricia Serre, Alexandre Mouchet, Bastien Rance, Gilles Chatellier, Ali Bellamine, Marie Frank, Julien Guerin, Xavier Tannier, Alain Livartowski, Martin Hilka, and Christel Daniel on the publication of How to Improve Cancer Patients ENrollment in Clinical Trials From rEal-Life Databases Using the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Oncology Extension: Results of the PENELOPE Initiative in Urologic Cancers in JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Matthew Spotnitz, Nripendra Acharya, James Cimino, Shawn Murphy, Bahram Namjou, Nancy Crimmins, Theresa Walunas, Cong Liu, David Crosslin, Barbara Benoit, Elisabeth Rosenthal, Jennifer Pacheco, Anna Ostropolets, Harry Reyes Nieva, Jason Patterson, Lauren Richter, Tiffany Callahan, Ahmed Elhussein, Chao Pang, Krzysztof Kiryluk, Jordan Nestor, Atlas Khan, Sumit Mohan, Evan Minty, Wendy Chung, Wei-Qi Wei, Karthik Natarajan, and Chunhua Weng on the publication of A metadata framework for computational phenotypes in JAMIA Open.

• Thank you to Anna Ostropolets for sharing the final version of the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies Assessment last week. As part of the Vocabularies improvement process, the OHDSI Coordinating Center established a diverse committee that governs the Vocabularies maintenance and improvement activities (George Hripcsak, Patrick Ryan, Peter Rijnbeek, Rae Woong Park, Mui Van Zandt and Christian Reich).

HADES Development Announcements

• Fan Bu announced the release of EvidenceSynthesis 0.5.0. This release adds the functionality to perform Bayesian bias correction in causal estimation and sequential analysis using negative control outcomes. A new vignette showcasing the new functionality has been added too.

• Joel Swerdel announced the release of PheValuator 2.2.8, which allows for the use of a custom visit_occurrence table for systems with extremely large visit_occurrence tables and limited processing capability. Joel also posted a new PheValuator tutorial, which you can watch here.

• Martijn Schuemie announced that DatabaseConnector 6.2.1 has been released. The most important change is a minor change to the DESCRIPTION file that was required by CRAN.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Evidence Synthesis (Yong Chen, Martijn Schuemie)

May 9: SOS Challenge Week 7: Study Diagnostics (Fan Bu, George Hripcsak)

The May 9 OHDSI Community Call provided the seventh tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on study diagnostics, and the session will be led by:

George Hripcsak (Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia Univ.)
Fan Bu (Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA // Incoming Assistant Professor, Univ. of Michigan)

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage. The video from the tutorial is posted below, and the slides are included here, including some that were not shown due to time, but include information on diagnostics about characterization, SCCS and Patient-level Prediction

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Xinzhuo Jiang, Maura Beaton, Jake Gillberg, Andrew Williams, and Karthik Natarajan on the publication of Feasibility of Linking Area Deprivation Index Data to the OMOP Common Data Model in the AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings Archive.

• Congratulations to the team of Venkata Joopudi, Bharath Dandala, Ching-Huei Tsou, and Jennifer Liang on the publication of Hierarchy-aware Adverse Reaction Embeddings for Signal Detection in the AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings Archive.

• Congratulations to the team of Anna Ostropolets, Patrick Ryan and George Hripcsak on the publication of Phenotyping in distributed data networks: selecting the right codes for the right patients in the AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings Archive.

• Applications for the 2023-24 Kheiron Contributor Cohort are being accepted through May 15. This program, which is currently in its second year, will help onboard and mentor open-source developers in the community. Katy Sadowski, a member of the original cohort, provided a video and written testimonial about her experience with the Kheiron Cohort.

• The most recent edition of the CBER BEST Seminar Series, Leveraging real-world data for better health in Europe through collaborations between regulators & academia, is now available to watch. It was presented by two previous Titan Award winners, Xintong Li and Dani Prieto-Alhambra.

• Azza Shoaibi has led or participated in several network studies, helped lead the first two Phenotype Phebruaries, and presented during the lightning talks at the 2022 OHDSI Global Symposium. In the latest collaborator spotlight, Azza discusses her journey to observational health data work, why the science of phenotyping is both challenging and exciting, why she serves on the OHDSI Symposium Scientific Review Committee, and plenty more.

• The latest edition of the OHDSI newsletter is now available. This edition includes links to all SOS Challenge tutorials, information and videos from DevCon and the Kheiron Cohort, the latest collaborator spotlight, links to April publications and presentations, and the most recent podcast video. If you don’t receive the newsletter monthly, you can subscribe here.

HADES Development Announcements

• Joel Swerdel announced the release of PheValuator 2.2.7, which allows for previously created models to be used in evaluations. It also fixes a bug in getPopnPrev.sql for sql server.

• Katy Sadowski announced the release of DataQualityDashboard 2.2.0. This release adds the option to specify a cohortTableName when executing data quality checks on a cohort. It also contains several bug fixes which are detailed in the linked NEWS.md file.

• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.15.0. The important development here is a minor change to the DESCRIPTION file that was required by CRAN.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Tutorial | Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Study Diagnostics (Fan Bu, George Hripcsak)

May 2: SOS Challenge Week 6: Network Execution (Jenna Reps, Jack Brewster)

The May 2 OHDSI Community Call provided the sixth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on network execution and was led by:

Jenna Reps (Associate Director, Janssen Research & Development)
Jack Brewster (Data Scientist, IQVIA)

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.

Community Updates

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Seminar Series will be this Wednesday, May 3 (11 am – 12 pm ET), and it will be presented by two OHDSI Titan award winners, Xintong Li and Dani Prieto-Alhambra. The virtual session will focus on “Leveraging real-world data for better health in Europe through collaborations between regulators & academia” and it is free for anybody. You can register here.

• DevCon 2023 was held last month, and it was exciting to see so many people in the community join this event. All video presentations from the opening session are now available on the event homepage.

• DevCon also served to open applications for the 2023-24 Kheiron Contributor Cohort. This program, which is currently in its second year, will help onboard and mentor open-source developers in the community. Katy Sadowski, a member of the original cohort, provided a video and written testimonial about her experience with the Kheiron Cohort.

• The next session of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held May 8 (11 am – 12 pm ET), and it will include a conversation with Mui Van Zandt, VP/GM Real World Data & Tech, IQVIA). You can join that session here.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Tutorial | Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Network Execution (Jenna Reps, Jack Brewster)

Apr. 25: SOS Challenge Week 5: Analysis Design (Patrick Ryan)

The April 25 OHDSI Community Call provided the fifth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on analysis design and was led by:

Patrick Ryan (Vice President, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.)

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Peter Leese, Adit Anand, Andrew Girvin, Amin Manna, Saaya Patel, Yun Jae Yoo, Rachel Wong, Melissa Haendel, Christopher G Chute, Tellen Bennett, Janos Hajagos, Emily Pfaff, Richard Moffitt on the publication of Clinical encounter heterogeneity and methods for resolving in networked EHR data: a study from N3C and RECOVER programs in JAMIA.

• The deadline to participate in the OHDSI European Symposium is less than one week away. The European call for participation, which is accepting submissions for posters and software demonstrations to be presented during the July 3 collaborator showcase, will conclude on Sunday, April 30.

• DevCon 2023 was held last Friday, and it was exciting to see so many people in the community join this event. All video presentations from the opening session are now available on the event homepage, and videos of the Session 2 workshops will be available later this week.

• DevCon also served to open applications for the 2023-24 Kheiron Contributor Cohort. This program, which is currently in its second year, will help onboard and mentor open-source developers in the community. Katy Sadowski, a member of the original cohort, provided a video and written testimonial about her experience with the Kheiron Cohort.

• The last two sessions of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series are now available on our YouTube channel: Seng Chan You (March) and Anna Ostropolets (April). The next session will be held on May 8, and it will include a conversation with Mui Van Zandt.

HADES Development Announcements

• Egill Fridgeirsson announced the release of DeepPatientLevelPrediction 1.1.4. This was a small change needed for running the package with Strategus. Now the device to develop the models on (GPU or CPU) can be controlled with an environment variable in the study package. Before it was hard coded in the study package. But users might want to select a certain GPU to use or even CPU for testing the package.

Thank you to all HADES developers for their continued work to maintain and enhance OHDSI open-source software. For more information on these or future releases, please visit this thread on the OHDSI forums.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Tutorial | Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Analysis Design (Patrick Ryan)

Apr. 18: SOS Challenge Week 4: Phenotype Evaluation (James Gilbert, Azza Shoaibi)

The April 18 OHDSI Community Call provided the fourth tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on phenotype evaluation and was led by:

Azza Shoaibi (Associate Director, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.)
James Gilbert (Manager, Epidemiology Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.)

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Stéphane Meystre, Paul Heider, Andrew Cates, Grace Bastian, Tara Pittman, Stephanie Gentilin, and Teresa Kelechi on the publication of Piloting an automated clinical trial eligibility surveillance and provider alert system based on artificial intelligence and standard data models in BMC Medical Research Methodology.

• DevCon 2023 will be held virtually this Friday from 9 am – 3 pm ET (link: join DevCon here). The full agenda is available at the event homepage. The event will feature 11 short talks around five topics in the first session, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community during the second session. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.

• The deadline to participate in the OHDSI European Symposium is quickly approaching. The European call for participation, which is accepting submissions for posters and software demonstrations to be presented during the July 3 collaborator showcase, will conclude on Sunday, April 30.

• The last two sessions of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series are now available on our YouTube channel: Seng Chan You (March) and Anna Ostropolets (April).

HADES Development Announcements

• Martijn Schuemie announced the releases of SqlRender 1.14.0 (contains some fixes for Spark, Oracle, Netezza, and PostgreSQL), DatabaseConnector 6.2.0 (a large set of fixes for DataBricks), SelfControlledCaseSeries 4.2.0 (fixes a bug that caused regularization to not be applied to calendar-time splines), and CohortMethod 5.0.0 (this a major update with many changes, including a major overhaul of the framework for running multiple analyses. There are no guarantees for backwards compatibility, so please read the changelog carefully. This version should provide greater flexibility and stability than before.)

• Joel Swerdel announced the release of PheValuator 2.2.6, which creates an export folder with a set of results from the analysis as well as diagnostics for the run. This csv files may be used in shiny applications. Joel also posted a new PheValuator tutorial, which you can watch here.

• Marc Suchard announced the release of BrokenAdaptiveRidge v1.0.0, which is now part of HADES. This package enables approximate L0 (best subset) regression at scale using Cyclops. He also announced that Cyclops v3.3.1 has been released and is now on CRAN. This features the introduction of Jeffreys prior and several fixes for likelihood profiling.

• Egill Fridgeirsson announced the release of DeepPatientLevelPrediction 1.1.3. This was a minor fix for the CI. Our main dependancy, torch in R, wasn’t installing correctly since a new release of it was released on CRAN.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

Slides

Tutorial | Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Phenotype Evaluation (James Gilbert, Azza Shoaibi)

Apr. 11: SOS Challenge Week 3: Phenotype Development (Anna Ostropolets, Asieh Golozar)

The April 11 OHDSI Community Call provided the third tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on phenotype development (both outcome and exposure design) and was led by:

Asieh Golozar (VP, Global Head of Data Science, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)
Anna Ostropolets (Director, Head of Innovation Lab, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)

SOS Challenge Week 3 • Focus: Data Diagnostics

Tutorial 1: Anna Ostropolets Recording | Asieh Golozar Recording
Tutorial 2: Christian Reich/Gowtham Rao (Tuesday, 7 pm ET): Meeting Link

Office Hours with Gowtham Rao (Friday, 9:30 am – 10:30 am ET): Meeting Link

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Erica A. Voss, Azza Shoaibi, Lana Yin Hui Lai, Clair Blacketer, Thamir Alshammari, Rupa Makadia, Kevin Haynes, Anthony G. Sena, Gowtham Rao, Sebastiaan van Sandijk, Clement Fraboulet, Laurent Boyer, Tanguy Le Carrour, Scott Horban, Daniel R. Morales, Jordi Martínez Roldán, Juan Manuel Ramírez-Anguita, Miguel A. Mayer, Marcel de Wilde, Luis H. John, Talita Duarte-Salles, Elena Roel, Andrea Pistillo, Raivo Kolde, Filip Maljković, Spiros Denaxas, Vaclav Papez, Michael G. Kahn, Karthik Natarajan, Christian Reich, Alex Secora, Evan P. Minty, Nigam H. Shah, Jose D. Posada, Maria Teresa Garcia Morales, Diego Bosca, Honorio Cadenas Juanino, Antonio Diaz Holgado, Miguel Pedrera Jiménez, Pablo Serrano Balazote, Noelia García Barrio, Selçuk Şen, Ali Yağız Üresin, Baris Erdogan, Luc Belmans, Geert Byttebier, Manu L.N.G. Malbrain, Daniel J. Dedman, Zara Cuccu, Rohit Vashisht, Atul J. Butte, Ayan Patel, Lisa Dahm, Cora Han, Fan Bu, Faaizah Arshad, Anna Ostropolets, Fredrik Nyberg, George Hripcsak, Marc A. Suchard, Dani Prieto-Alhambra, Peter R. Rijnbeek, Martijn J. Schuemie, and Patrick B. Ryan on the publication of Contextualising adverse events of special interest to characterise the baseline incidence rates in 24 million patients with COVID-19 across 26 databases: a multinational retrospective cohort study in eClinicalMedicine.

• Congratulations to the team of Francesco Cremonesi, Vincent Planat, Varvara Kalokyri, Haridimos Kondylakis, Tiziana Sanavia, Victor Miguel Mateos Resinas, Babita Singh, and Silvia Uribe on the publication of The need for multimodal health data modeling: a practical approach for a federated-learning healthcare platform in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Smith Heavner, Wesley Anderson, Rahul Kashyap, Pamela Dasher, Ewy Mathé, Laura Merson, Philippe Guerin, Jeff Weaver, Matthew Robinson, Marco Schito, Vishakha Kumar, and Paul Nagy on the publication of A Path to Real-World Evidence in Critical Care Using Open-Source Data Harmonization Tools in Critical Care Explorations.

• Deadlines to participate in the OHDSI Asia-Pacific (APAC) and European Symposiums are quickly approaching. The APAC call for participation ends Friday, April 15, while the European call for participation concludes Sunday, April 30.

• The next edition of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held Monday, April 10, from 11 am – 12 pm ET, and it will feature a conversation with Anna Ostropolets, a Titan Award honoree as an original leader with the vocabulary team and a DBMI PhD graduate whose interests include bias adjustment in phenotyping and evidence generalizability (Phoebe and KEEPER), as well as point of care evidence generation (Data Consult Service). You can join the meeting using this link.

• The next CBER Best seminar series presentation will take place Wednesday, April 12, at 11 am ET. Dr. Kaat Bollaerts, Head of Data Science at P95, will share her work on “Quantifying bias due to disease- and exposure misclassification in studies of vaccine effectiveness.” Registration is free for this virtual presentation, and everybody is welcome.

Johns Hopkins University will host Grand Rounds with Dr. Danielle Boyce on Thursday, April 13, from 12-1 pm ET. The topic will be “Lived Experience in Observational Research: Data Scientists as Patient Advocates.” Click here for the event link.

• The agenda and meeting link for DevCon 2023 is now available at the event homepage. The event will last from 9 am – 3 pm on April 21 and will feature 11 short talks around five topics (see agenda on the homepage) in the morning, followed by a trio of afternoon workshops that focus on significant topics for sustained success within our open-source community. Thank you to Adam Black and Paul Nagy for organizing this event.

HADES Development Announcements

• Jamie Gilbert announced the releases of both CohortDiagnostics 3.2.0 and ResultModelManager 0.4.0. The CohortDiagnostics update removed package dependency snapshot capture as it was breaking on newer versions of R. The ResultModelManager release adds some vignettes on usage as well as a QueryNamespace class that adds a wrapper around SqlRender functionality that allows execution of queries with fixed parameters from result model specifications.

• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of EvidenceSynthesis 0.4.1. The only change is the addition of a video vignette, which was also featured in the ESMARConf 2023 conference.

• Chris Knoll announced the release of ATLAS/WebAPI 2.13.0. More information on both the ATLAS and WebAPI updates can be found within the links.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• The 2023 Asia-Pacific (APAC) Symposium will be held July 13-14 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and it will follow MedInfo 2023 (July 8-12 in Sydney, Australia). Registration and the call for participation has opened for this event. The call for participation deadline for abstracts is April 15. The agenda is now posted on the event homepage. The main conference will be held July 13 with sessions focused on OHDSI Global, Research, and OHDSI APAC, while there will be tutorials held on July 14. The call for collaboration is happening now, while registration details will be available shortly.

Job Postings

• The Observational Health Data Analytics (OHDA) team at Janssen Research & Development recently opened up five new internships for the coming summer, with each lasting at least 10 weeks and starting around the middle of May. There are openings for an epidemiology graduate intern, a graduate intern, and an undergraduate intern; check out the respective links for more information and an application link. Janssen also announced two summer internships for a Data Science RWE for R&D position, and a Data Science RWE DevCon position.

Slides

Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Phenotype Development, Outcome Design (Anna Ostropolets)

Phenotype Development, Exposure Design (Asieh Golozar)

Apr. 4: SOS Challenge Week 2: Data Diagnostics (Clair Blacketer, Mui Van Zandt, Sarah Seager)

The April 4 OHDSI Community Call provided the second tutorial for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session focused on data diagnostics and was led by:

Clair Blacketer (Director, Janssen Research and Development)
Mui Van Zandt (VP & GM Real World Data & Tech, IQVIA)
Sarah Seager (Director, A&AI, IQVIA)

SOS Challenge Week 2 • Focus: Data Diagnostics

Tutorial 1: Clair Blacketer/Mui Van Zandt (Tuesday, 11 am ET): Recording
Tutorial 2: Clair Blacketer/Jing Li (Tuesday, 7 pm ET): Meeting Link

Office Hours with Clair Blacketer (Thursday, 10 am – 11 am ET): Meeting Link

For more information on the SOS Challenge, links to study-related materials, schedules, meeting links and more, please visit the event homepage.

Community Updates

• The latest OHDSI newsletter is now available. It includes community updates from the last month, including all March publications and presentations, updates on the SOS Challenge, DevCon, the latest collaborator spotlight, and plenty more. If you didn’t receive the newsletter in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

• Aniek Markus is pursuing her PhD at the department of Medical Informatics with a focus on explainable artificial intelligence at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She discussed her journey to health data science, her focus on explainable AI, and how OMOP and OHDSI tools are assisting her research career, in the latest OHDSI Collaborator Spotlight.

HADES Development Announcements

• Adam Black announced the release of Andromeda 0.6.3. This release add is AndromedaTable function that works with both the current andromeda tables (SQLite references) and the Andromeda v1.0 tables (Apache Arrow FileSystemDatasets).
• Anthony Sena announced the release of Cohort Generator 0.8.0. This release of CohortGenerator adds the ability to generate subsets of cohorts.
• Martin Lavallee announced the release of Capr 2.0.1. This is a patch release, so there are. No major changes.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

Job Postings

OHDSI Social Showcase

• The #OHDSISocialShowcase continues this week, as all the research from the OHDSI Symposium collaborator showcase will be presented on the Twitter and LinkedIn social feeds over the next several months. You can see the research and the respective leads that will be shared this week.

Monday: A Machine Learning based Enrollment Rate Forecasting System (Yiqiao Yin)
Tuesday: Strategus: Marching towards transparent, reproducible research (Anthony Sena)
Wednesday: Multinational Patterns of Second-line Anti-hyperglycemic Drug Initiation: A LEGEND-T2DM Study (Lovedeep Dhingra)

Slides

Data Diagnostics | Community Updates

Tutorial Video

Data Diagnostics (Clair Blacketer, Mui Van Zandt, Sarah Seager)

Mar. 28: SOS Challenge Week 1: Initiating A Network Study + SOS Overview (Suchard, McLeggon)

The March 28 OHDSI Community Call served as the official kickoff for the Save Our Sisyphus (SOS) Challenge. This session provided an overview of how the two-month event will take place and announce the featured studies before moving into the first tutorial of the challenge, Initiating A Network Study. This call was led by:

Marc Suchard (Professor, Departments of Biomathematics and Human Genetics, UCLA)
Jody-Ann McLeggon (Program Manager, Columbia University)

Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Aniek Markus, Victoria Strauss, Edward Burn, Xintong Li, Antonella Delmestri, Christian Reich, Can Yin, Miguel Mayer, Juan-Manuel Ramírez-Anguita, Edelmira Marti, Katia Verhamme, Peter Rijnbeek, Daniel Prieto-Alhambra and Annika Jödicke on the publication of Characterising the treatment of thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination in 4 European countries and the US: An international network cohort study in Frontiers of Pharmacology.

• Congratulations to the team of Turki Abdulaziz Althunian, Meshael M Alrasheed, Fatemah Alnofal, Rawan T Tafish, Mahmood A Mira, Raseel A Alroba, Mohammed W Kirdas, and Thamir M Alshammar on the publication of Recording type 2 diabetes mellitus in a standardised central Saudi database: a retrospective validation study in BMJ Open.

• Aniek Markus, lead author of the afore-mentioned study, is pursuing her PhD at the department of Medical Informatics with a focus on explainable artificial intelligence at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She discussed her journey to health data science, her focus on explainable AI, and how OMOP and OHDSI tools are assisting her research career, in the latest OHDSI Collaborator Spotlight.

• Registration and the call for participation has opened for the 2023 Global Symposium, which will be held Oct. 20-22 in East Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, at the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center. Check out the event homepage for more information and registration/call for collaboration links.

• The 2023 APAC Symposium agenda is now posted on the event homepage. The main conference will be held July 13 with sessions focused on OHDSI Global, Research, and OHDSI APAC, while there will be tutorials held on July 14. The call for collaboration is happening now, while registration details will be available shortly.

• Last week, Martijn Schuemie hosted the latest CBER BEST Seminar Series with a talk on Negative controls and p-value calibration in RWE generation. If you missed the talk — or want to see it again — the video is now available. The next session will be held April 12 and will be led by Kaat Bollaerts; you can register for that seminar here.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage. The closing date is Friday, March 31.

HADES Development Announcements

• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.13.0, with a single bugfix for Netezza.

• Egill Fridgeirsson announced the release of DeepPatientLevelPrediction 1.1.1, which has both bug fixes and several new features: an automatic learning rate finder has been implemented, used by setting learningRate=”auto”; training loop parameters are now handled by a new settings object and as a result more of the training loop parameters are customizable by the user; custom metrics can be created by the user to use for early stopping and learning rate schedule; and seeds have been added in various places, making the whole process more reproducible

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J. Registration will open TOMORROW, March 21! Check out the symposium homepage for more information and the registration link.

• Andrey Soares and Asiyah Lin are co-chairs of workshops and tutorials for the 2023 International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, a hybrid event which will be hosted Aug. 28-Sept. 1 by the University of Brasilia. If you would like to submit a workshop or tutorial, the deadline is April 3.

Job Postings

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: How Health Systems Can Create Value by Adopting the OMOP CDM (John Methot)
Tuesday: Best practices for prognostic model development using observational health data: a scoping review (Cynthia Yang)
Wednesday: Serverless CDM in OHDSIonAWS (Ashwini Davison)
Thursday: A simplified ETL approach to transforming the MIMIC database into the OMOP Common Data Model in SQLite (Luis Alberto Robles Hernandez)
Friday: PULSNAR: Positive Unlabeled Learning Selected Not At Random –towards imputing undocumented conditions in EHRs and estimating their incidence (Praveen Kumar)

Slides

SOS Overview | Community Updates

Presentations

Initiating A Network Study (Marc Suchard)

SOS Overview (Jody-Ann McLeggon, Cindy Cai)

Mar. 21: Recent OHDSI Publications (Luo, Kim, Xie, Peng, Yu)

The March 21 community five recent publications from the OHDSI community. Videos and slides of all presentations are available at the bottom of this section, while the study is linked to the titles here:

Rates of Antipsychotic Drug Prescribing Among People Living With Dementia During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Hao Luo, Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong)

Safety outcomes of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in adolescent attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder with comorbid depression: the ASSURE study (Chungsoo Kim, PhD Candidate, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Ajou University)

Risk of COVID-19 Diagnosis and Hospitalisation in Patients with Osteoarthritis or Back Pain Treated with Ibuprofen Compared to Other NSAIDs or Paracetamol: A Network Cohort Study (Junqing (Frank) Xie, DPhil Student & Research Assistant, University of Oxford)

An ETL-process design for data harmonization to participate in international research with German real-world data based on FHIR and OMOP CDM (Yuan Peng, Research Fellow, Technische Universität Dresden)

Integrating real-world data to assess cardiac ablation device outcomes in a multicenter study using the OMOP common data model for regulatory decisions: implementation and evaluation (Yue Yu, Senior Bioinformatician, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, Mayo Clinic)

Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Vipina Keloth, Juan M Banda, Michael Gurley, Paul Heider, Georgina Kennedy, Hongfang Liu, Feifan Liu, Timothy Miller, Karthik Natarajan, Olga V Patterson, Yifan Peng, Kalpana Raja, Ruth M Reeves, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Jianlin Shi, Xiaoyan Wang, Yanshan Wang, Wei-Qi Wei, Andrew Williams, Rui Zhang, Rimma Belenkaya, Christian Reich, Clair Blacketer, Patrick Ryan, George Hripcsak, Noémie Elhadad, and Hua Xu on the publication of Representing and Utilizing Clinical Textual Data for Real World Studies: An OHDSI Approach in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra and Kristin Kostka recently shared the preprint The burden of long COVID: a multinational cohort analysis of Spanish and UK data including SARS-CoV-2 infections, reinfections, and matched contemporaneous test negative controls. Community feedback is appreciated.

• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study Challenge will begin next week, and we are still seeking people who are interested in taking part in any way. If you are interested in joining this event, or you want to vote for your preferred research idea, please fill out this form by the end of Tuesday.

• The next edition of the CBER BEST Seminar Series will be held Wednesday, March 22, at 11 am ET, and will feature a presentation from Martijn Schuemie on ‘Negative controls and p-value calibration in RWE generation.’ More information and a registration link is available here.

HADES Development Announcements

• Martin Lavallee announced the release of Capr 2.0. This is a major update overhauling the user-interface of Capr. The intent of the overhaul is to improve the readability of the Capr code. For full details visit the package website.

• Martijn Schuemie announced the following updates this week: Bigknn 1.0.2 (adds support for the upcoming Andromeda release), SqlRender 1.13.0 (has some fixes for BigQuery, SQLite, and DuckDB), ROhdsiWebApi 1.3.3 (minor update to pass R Check again), and DatabaseConnector 6.1.0 (adds support for DuckDB, fixes some issues related to Java heap memory, and fixes some Snowflake issues).

• Katy Sadowski announced the release of DataQualityDashboard 2.1.2. This release contains a bug fix for the cdmDataType check SQL.

• Adam Black announced the release of Andromeda 0.6.2. This adds one function is AndromedaTable() that should work with both SQLite and Arrow andromeda tables.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J. Registration is now open for the event.

• The 2023 AMIA Symposium will be held Nov. 11-15 in New Orleans, La., and the annual call for participation is underway. Proposals are being accepted for papers, podium abstracts, panels, posters, debates, demos and workshops. The deadline is March 23, 2023.

Job Postings

• Christoph Lambert shared this new opening: The University of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center, Department of Internal Medicine, seeks a faculty member to join the Division of Translational Informatics. This position is at the Open rank and Tenure track. While the focus of the position is research-oriented, optionally, the position affords the opportunity for the candidate to have a joint clinical appointment for part-time clinical service with the University of New Mexico, and/or the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center. Applications are requested by March 13, 2023.

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: Towards Similarity Search in Phenotype Libraries (Yen Low)
Tuesday: Data Network Feasibility Tool (Frank DeFalco)
Wednesday: DPM360: New Additions to Advanced Disease Progression Modeling (Akira Koseki)
Thursday: OMOP’s evolution in the data reuse strategy of Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre (Noelia Garcia)
Friday: Identification of patients with drug resistant epilepsy in electronic medical record data using the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (Matthew Spotnitz)

Slides

Studies: Luo | Kim | Xie | Peng | Yu
Other: Community Updates

Presentations

Rates of Antipsychotic Drug Prescribing Among People Living With Dementia During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Hao Luo)

Safety outcomes of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in adolescent attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder with comorbid depression: the ASSURE study (Chungsoo Kim)

Risk of COVID-19 Diagnosis and Hospitalisation in Patients with Osteoarthritis or Back Pain Treated with Ibuprofen Compared to Other NSAIDs or Paracetamol: A Network Cohort Study (Junqing (Frank) Xie)

An ETL-process design for data harmonization to participate in international research with German real-world data based on FHIR and OMOP CDM (Yuan Peng)

Integrating real-world data to assess cardiac ablation device outcomes in a multicenter study using the OMOP common data model for regulatory decisions: implementation and evaluation (Yue Yu)

Mar. 14: Debates! (Lehmann, Ostropolets, Beachler, Weaver)

The March 14 community call brought back the popular debates format. Videos of both debates are available at the bottom of this section.

Debate 1
An authority has provided me an ICD-10 codelist to use to identify patients with a disease. I should use that source codelist ‘as is’ for verbatim replication, and not consider it as a starting point for phenotype development/evaluation process to model the authority’s intent using standard concepts. Debaters: Harold Lehmann (Professor of Health Sciences Informatics, Johns Hopkins University) and Anna Ostropolets (Clinical Data Scientist, Odysseus Data Services, Inc.)

Debate 2
Source chart review adjudication is a necessary component of phenotype evaluation to ensure reliable evidence. Debaters: Daniel Beachler (Director of Safety & Epidemiology, Carelon Research) and James Weaver (Associate Director, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research & Development)

Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Santiago Frid, Xavier Pastor Duran, Guillem Bracons Cucó, Miguel Pedrera-Jiménez, Pablo Serrano-Balazote, Adolfo Muñoz Carrero, and Raimundo Lozano-Rubí on the publication of An Ontology-Based Approach for Consolidating Patient Data Standardized With European Norm/International Organization for Standardization 13606 (EN/ISO 13606) Into Joint Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Repositories: Description of a Metho dology in JMIR Medical Informatics.

• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study Challenge will begin March 28, and we are seeking people who are interested in taking part in any way. If you are interested in joining this event, or you want to vote for your preferred research idea, please fill out this form before March 21.

• Updates to the OHDSI Community Dashboard are coming. Paul Nagy shared some of these enhancements during Tuesday’s community call.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J.

Job Postings

• The Successful Clinical Response In Pneumonia Therapy (SCRIPT) Systems Biology Center (SCRIPT) is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work at the intersection of systems biology and clinical data management. The fellow will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, biologists, geneticists, and data scientists to develop tools to improve the management of multifaceted data to support systems biology research. Candidates should have strong software development skills and an MD or PhD with research experience with Electronic Health Record data. Experience with Common Data Models, such as OMOP CDM from OHDSI, is preferred. More information is available here.

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: Development of a Framework for Cancer Profiling and Visualization (Soobeen Seol)
Tuesday: Evaluating causal inference methods for survival data in large-scale observational studies (Shiyao Xu)
Wednesday: NACHC’s open-source implementation of FHIR to OMOP tool suite (John Gresh)
Thursday: Assessing Measurement Data Quality in the All of Us Research Program (Jason Patterson)
Friday: Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health: A multinational network study (Yi Chai)

Slides

Community Dashboard Updates |Community Updates

Presentations

Debate 1: An authority has provided me an ICD-10 codelist to use to identify patients with a disease. I should use that source codelist ‘as is’ for verbatim replication, and not consider it as a starting point for phenotype development/evaluation process to model the authority’s intent using standard concepts (Harold Lehmann, Anna Ostropolets)

Debate 2: Source chart review adjudication is a necessary component of phenotype evaluation to ensure reliable evidence (Bechler, Weaver)

Mar. 7: Save Our Sisyphus Challenge Research Presentations (Janetzki, Yiu, Alshammary, Cai)

The March 7 community call highlighted the research submissions shared for the Save Our Sisyphus Network Study Challenge. We heard about four study ideas that could serve as the foundation for our eight-week network study challenge this spring.

Is fluoroquinolone use really associated with the development of aortic aneurysms (Jack Janetzki, University of South Australia)
Amongst people with psoriasis, does exposure to Risankizumab increase the risk of venous thromboembolism while on treatment relative to other biologic therapies? (Zenas Yiu, University of Manchester)
Characterization: incidence of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) during Multiple Sclerosis (MS) biologic exposure (Thamir Alshammary, Almaarefa University)
Intravitreal Anti-VEGF and Kidney Failure (Cindy Cai, Johns Hopkins University)

You can vote on which research topic you want to see highlighted during the SOS Challenge before March 21.

Updates

• Congratulations to 2022 Titan Award for Methodological Research honoree Fan Bu, who accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, starting Jan. 1, 2024.

• Congratulations to Peter Rijnbeek, who held his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Scalable Evidence’, as Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at Erasmus University on Friday, March 3. Members of the OHDSI community shared their congratulatory messages to Peter.

• The latest edition of the OHDS newsletter is now available. It includes a recap on Phenotype Phbruary, the latest collaborator spotlight with Faaizah Arshad, publications & presentations from February, community updates and more. If you don’t receive the newsletter each month, you can subscribe here.

• The OHDSI workgroups shared their goals for 2023 during the February community calls. All of the presentations are now available on the workgroups homepage.

• Andrew Williams has announced an exciting new initiative at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts University. He is leading the new Center for Advanced Healthcare Research Informatics, which will work to produce new modes and methods of using healthcare-generated data and other related data to support research, and to use these methods at Tufts Medicine and in research communities to generate evidence and improve care.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the NEW location of the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in East Brunswick, N.J.

• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.

HADES Development Announcements

• Katy Sadowski announced the release of DataQualityDashboard 2.1.1. This is the first release of the package which meets all HADES requirements, and hereafter DQD will be a part of HADES. You can read more about the update here.

Job Postings

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: Development of Phenotype Algorithms and Characterizations of Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma Using Real-World Data (Nathan Hall)
Tuesday: Disambiguation of ICPC codes using free-text and active learning to improve concept mappings (Tom Seinen)
Wednesday: Knowledge Graph to aid Cohort Diagnostics in concept sets developing (Thi Ngoc Mai Nguyen)
Thursday: Criteria2Query 2.0: Combining Human and Machine Intelligence for Cohort Identification (Yilu Fang)
Friday: Prediction of insulin resistance in depression is associated with long-term clinical outcomes (Dong Yun Lee)

Slides

SOS Presentations: Janetzky | Yiu | Alshammari | Cai
Others: Community Updates

Presentations

Is fluoroquinolone use really associated with the development of aortic aneurysms (Jack Janetzki, University of South Australia)

Amongst people with psoriasis, does exposure to Risankizumab increase the risk of venous thromboembolism while on treatment relative to other biologic therapies? (Zenas Yiu, University of Manchester)

Characterization: incidence of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) during Multiple Sclerosis (MS) biologic exposure (Thamir Alshammary, Almaarefa University)

Intravitreal Anti-VEGF and Kidney Failure (Cindy Cai, Johns Hopkins University)

Feb. 28: Workgroup OKRs + Phenotype Phebruary Week 4 (multiple speakers)

The Feb. 28 community call provided our final update on Phenotype Phebruary, which was led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. Evan Minty and Khyzer Aziz discussed some specific phenotype work around neonatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, while Azza Shoiabi provided an impressive wrap-up of all the outputs from the month. To join or follow any of these discussions, please visit our Phenotype Phebruary homepage.

We also had our fourth week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from our OHDSI workgroups. This week, we heard about the following teams: Clinical Trials (Mike Hamidi), Vaccine Vocabulary (Asiyah Lin), Medical Devices (Asiyah Lin), Education (Nigel Hughes), FHIR & OMOP (Davera Gabriel), Medical Imaging (Paul Nagy), Perinatal and Reproductive Health Group (Alison Callahan), and Prediction (Jenna Reps).

The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Anna Ostropolets, Yasser Albogami, Mitchell Conover, Juan Banda, William Baumgartner, Clair Blacketer, Priyamvada Desai, Scott DuVall, Stephen Fortin, James Gilbert, Asieh Golozar, Joshua Ide, Andrew Kanter, David Kern, Chungsoo Kim, Lana Lai, Chenyu Li, Feifan Liu, Kristine Lynch, Evan Minty, Maria Inês Neves, Ding Quan Ng, Tontel Obene, Victor Pera, Nicole Pratt, Gowtham Rao, Nadav Rappoport, Ines Reinecke, Paola Saroufim, Azza Shoaibi, Katherine Simon, Marc Suchard, Joel Swerdel, Erica Voss, James Weaver, Linying Zhang, George Hripcsak, and Patrick Ryan on the publication of Reproducible variability: assessing investigator discordance across 9 research teams attempting to reproduce the same observational study in JAMIA.

• Faaizah Arshad is a psychology major at UCLA who has already taken a strong role within the OHDSI community. The 2021 Titan Award recipient for Community Support, she became the first undergraduate to take part in a symposium plenary when she presented on ‘The EUMAEUS project: Applying methods sequentially’ during the 2021 Global Symposium. In the latest collaborator spotlight, she discusses how OHDSI has impacted her undergraduate education, how she was able to make such an impact so early in her journey in observational research, and why she believes other junior researchers can make an impact in OHDSI.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared that the Health Data Sciences section of the Oxford University Botnar Research has created five Trueta bursaries for the residential one-week summer school in Real World Evidence, held June 19-23, 2023. These bursaries will cover free attendance to the Oxford Summer School 2023: Real World Evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model and accommodation (including breakfast and dinner) in Lady Margaret Hall facilities for the duration of the course. To learn if you are eligible for one of the bursaries and to apply, please visit this homepage.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• We are excited to officially announce the OHDSI 2023 Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 in East Brunswick, New Jersey at the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel & Executive Meeting Center. Registration will be opened shortly, as well as a website with information, including travel details for those who will no longer fly to Washington DC. We have three great days of community collaboration opportunities in store, so we hope to see you all there.

• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.

HADES Development Announcements

• Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.12.1. This contains two bugfixes for Snowflake.

Job Postings

• Georgina Kennedy shared a recent opportunity for a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, to join in a project to understand the current use and future potential of real-world data to measure, explain and respond to variation in clinical cancer care. This funded position comes with a living costs stipend, and a technical background is required. You can learn more about the position/project here, and you can reach out to georgina.kennedy@unsw.edu.au for more information.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra recently shared an opening for a Database Programmer to join the Health Data Sciences research group at the University of Oxford. According to the posting, you will develop new database applications for big clinical data to meet project requirements and deadlines, provide software feedback and carry out software improvement, extension, integration and further development on existing code. You will contribute to the harmonisation, curation, and processing of large clinical datasets and develop code to validate, test, document and maintain database applications. The full ad and application link are available here, and the closing date is Feb. 27, 2023.

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: HERMES: A Health Resources Econometric Analysis Tool (Kyungseon Choi)
Tuesday: Assessing Racial Fairness of Dialysis Allocation in End-Stage Renal Disease (Linying Zhang)
Wednesday: Preliminary Analysis of Self-Reported COVID-19 Vaccination Side Effects on Twitter (Nishanth Pavinkurve)
Thursday: Data Quality Monitoring, Transparency and Governance: Enterprise process for data quality stewardship and governance for real-world data (Parsa Mirhaji)
Friday: Real world prescribing patterns of dupilumab for atopic dermatitis (Torunn Sivesind)

Slides

Presentations

Workgroup OKRs (Mike Hamidi, Asiyah Lin, Nigel Hughes, Davera Gabriel, Paul Nagy, Alison Callahan, Jenna Reps)

Phenotype Phebruary Update (Gowtham Rao, Azza Shoaibi, Evan Minty, Khyzer Aziz)

Feb. 21: Workgroup OKRs + Phenotype Phebruary Week 3 (multiple speakers)

The Feb. 21 community call provided our third update on Phenotype Phebruary, which was led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. The phenotype discussions that were featured during Week 3 included Parkinson’s disease (Allan Wu) and myocardial infarction (Mirza Khan/Adam Atif), and Mirza Khan joins the discussion to provide an update on myocardial infarction. Khyzer Aziz discusses early work done on the Week 4 phenotype, Neonatal Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy. There is also an ongoing discussion on what makes cohort definitions reusable, which will be included in the update. To join or follow any of these discussions, please visit our Phenotype Phebruary homepage.

We also had our third week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from our OHDSI workgroups. This week, we heard about the following teams: Early-Stage Researchers (Faaizah Arshad), Healthcare Systems Special Interest Group (Melanie Philofsky), Oncology (Asieh Golozar), Eye Care and Vision Science (Michelle Hribar), Latin America (Jose Posada), Psychiatry (Dmitry Dymshyts), and Health Equity (Jake Gillberg).

The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Joel Swerdel, Darmendra Ramcharran, and Jill Hardin on the publication of Using a data-driven approach for the development and evaluation of phenotype algorithms for systemic lupus erythematosus in PLoS One.

• Congratulations to the team of Chungsoo Kim, Dong Yun Lee, Jimyung Park, Su-Jin Yang, Eng Hooi Tan, Daniel-Prieto Alhambra, Yo Han Lee, Sangha Lee, Seong-Ju Kim, Jeewon Lee, Rae Woong Park and Yunmi Shin on the publication of Safety outcomes of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in adolescent attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder with comorbid depression: the ASSURE study in Psychological Medicine.

• THIS IS THE FINAL WEEK to include your input in the vocabulary landscape assessment surveys! Anna Ostropolets introduced these surveys last month; the first is an overall form for people who use the vocabularies for research, ETL, software development or something else. The second is an ETL-specific form for those who perform ETL or have an OMOP CDM instance at their disposal. Please fill it for each data source you have as we will use this information to prioritize the vocabularies we work on

• Phenotype Phebruary continues, and there is now a homepage on OHDSI.org that contains direct links to all forum threads, as well as videos from both phenotype discussions and updates from community calls.

• #OHDSI2023 is coming Oct. 20-22, and we are looking for people to join the scientific review committee. If you are interested in helping review our community research in the leadup to our global symposium, please fill out this form.

• The EHDEN Academy recently announced its newest addition, a one-hour module on “the phenotyping program” led by Gowtham Rao. Please visit the EHDEN Academy homepage to take this or any of the Academy’s 20+ courses and join the 3,500 students across 100 nations who have already enrolled.

• Dani Prieto-Alhambra announced that applications are open for the 2023 Health Data Science Black Internship Programme at the University of Oxford. This will be an eight-week paid internship this summer for junior Black researchers to expand their knowledge around health data science and gain the experience needed to either begin or advance a career in the field. Learn more and apply here!

• The Save Our Sisyphus Network Study event begins in late March, but we are currently looking for an interesting research question to kick off this event. If you have one and would like to serve as P.I. for this global collaboration, please fill out this form. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 28.

OHDSI Symposiums and Other Collaboration Opportunities

• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.

HADES Development Announcements

• There were three announcements of new HADES updates over the last week. Jamie Gilbert announced the release of ResultModelManager v0.3.0; Gowtham Rao announced the release of CohortExplorer v0.0.11; and Martijn Schuemie shared the release of ROhdsiWebApi 1.3.2. Read more about these updates here.

Job Postings

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: Cohort Diagnostics using Oncology Data Items for Multi-national Cancer Cohort (Seo Jeong Shin)
Tuesday: Framework for Assessing the Reproducibility of Observational Comparative Effectiveness Research: DOACs and Ischemic or Hemorrhagic Events Case Study (Asieh Golozar)
Wednesday: Development of cancer-related information extraction model from pathology reports using transfer learning (Jimyung Park)
Thursday: dGEM: Decentralized algorithm for Generalized mixed Effect Models with the Application in Hospital Profiling (Jiayi Tong)
Friday: Federated Patient-Level Prediction (Byungjin Choi)

Slides

Presentations

Workgroup OKRs (Faaizah Arshad, Melanie Philofsky, Michelle Hribar, Asieh Golozar, Jose Posada, Dmitry Dymshyts, Jake Gillberg)

Phenotype Phebruary Week 3 (Azza Shoaibi, Gowtham Rao, Mirza Khan, Keyzer Aziz)

Feb. 14: Workgroup OKRs + Phenotype Phebruary Week 2 (multiple speakers)

The Feb. 14 community call provided our second update on Phenotype Phebruary, which was led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. The phenotype discussions that were featured during Week 2 included systemic lupus erythematous (Dani Prieto-Alhambra/Joel Swerdel), acute hepatic failure (Patrick Ryan/Christian Reich), and idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (Chistopher Mecoli/Asieh Golozar). There was also an ongoing discussion on evaluation, which will be included in the update. To join or follow any of these discussions, please visit our Phenotype Phebruary homepage.

We also had our second week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from our OHDSI workgroups. On Tuesday, we will hear about the following teams: ATLAS/WebAPI (Anthony Sena), Registry (Tina Parciak), OHDSI China (Lei Liu), CDM Vocabulary Subgroup (Michael Kallfelz), Dentistry (Robert Koski), APAC Steering Group (Mui Van Zandt), GIS (Kyle Zollo-Venecek), and NLP (Hua Xu).

The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.

Community Updates

• The OHDSI European Symposium will be held July 1-3. More information will come.

• The EHDEN Academy recently announced that its free, virtual academic program that contains 17 courses around all aspects of real-world-evidence generation has been used in more than 100 countries by nearly 3,500 course enrollees. If you are interested in learning more or getting started, please visit the EHDEN Academy homepage.

• Jenna Reps recently announced two HADES updates, OhdsiShinyModules v1.0.2 and ShinyAppBuilder v1.1.1.

• Rachael Davis is leading a network study to characterize and evaluate trends in pathways for antiretroviral therapy (ART) for individuals who have been diagnosed with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and treated persistently over two years. She is seeking collaborators and data partners for this study. Please reach out raechel.davis@yale.edu if you are interested in collaborating or participating.

• Anna Ostropolets introduced a vocabulary landscape assessment survey to directly inform which vocabularies and activities the vocabulary team prioritizes in 2023. There is also an ETL-specific survey for those who perform ETL or have an OMOP CDM instance at their disposal. More information on this survey is posted below, and the deadline is Feb. 23.

• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.

• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.

Job Postings

• The Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) seeks exceptional junior-level faculty members in the tenure track. The positions are open to researchers interested in developing and applying informatics theory and achieving tangible benefits to health care and biology. Three particular foci are (1) machine learning for healthcare and health-related data science, (2) health information technology-based interventions to improve health care and the health of individuals and populations, and (3) translational bioinformatics. DBMI serves as the coordinating center for OHDSI; more information and an application link are posted here.

• The Observational Health Data Analytics (OHDA) team at Janssen Research & Development recently opened up three new internships for the coming year, with each lasting at least 10 weeks and starting around the middle of May. There are openings for an epidemiology graduate intern, a graduate intern, and an undergraduate intern; check out the respective links for more information and an application link.

• Janssen also announced two summer internships for a Data Science RWE for R&D position, and a Data Science RWE DevCon position. Within this role, interns will work on a project that seeks to develop phenotypes of interest for Janssen CVM development programs using the OMOP CDM and to use evaluation methods to characterize them according to performance and portability to different datasets. The interns will gain relevant experience in development and systematic evaluation of phenotypes in large RWD.

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: ICD10–SNOMED mapping pitfalls: Post-coordinated expressions and concept sets (Sigfried Gold)
Tuesday: Developing a frailty concept in the OMOP CDM among sexual minority older adults (age 50+) in the All of Us database (Brianne Olivieri-Mui)
Wednesday: Syntactic and Semantic Harmonization of the French National Healthcare Database (SNDS) (Lorien Benda)
Thursday: Using data augmentation for NER-RE joint learning tasks for clinical history information extraction (Xiaodong Zhu)
Friday: Using dbt – a free and open-source software – to transform data into OMOP CDM in the ETL process (Thanapat Pitchayarat)

Slides

Presentations

Workgroup OKRs (Lei Liu, Hua Xu, Anthony Sena, Tina Parciak, Michael Kallfelz, Robert Koski, Mui Van Zandt, Kyle Zollo-Venecek)

Phenotype Phebruary Week 2 (Azza Shoaibi, Gowtham Rao, Joel Swerdel, Christian Reich, Mirza Khan)

Feb. 7: Workgroup OKRs + Phenotype Phebruary Week 1 (multiple speakers)

The Feb. 7 community call provided our first update on Phenotype Phebruary, which is being led by Gowtham Rao and Azza Shoaibi. The phenotype discussions that began during Week 1 included acute pancreatitis (Evan Minty), anaphylaxis (Andrea Noel), appendicitis (Azza Shoaibi), and neutropenia (Anna Ostropolets).

We also had our first week of 2023 objectives & key results (OKRs) announcements from the following OHDSI workgroups: Common Data Model (Clair Blacketer), Data Quality (Clair Blacketer), Perioperative Medicine and Surgery (Jenny Lane), HADES (Martijn Schuemie), PLE Methods Research (Martijn Schuemie), Open-Source Community (Adam Black), and the Steering Group (Patrick Ryan).

The video presentations and slide decks for each talk are available below.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to Sara Khalid, an OHDSI collaborator who was recently awarded the title of Associate Professor at the University of Oxford.

• The next edition of the Early-Stage Researchers Career Speaker Series will be held Monday, Feb. 13, and will feature a discussion with Paul Nagy. The session will be held between 11 am – 12 pm during the monthly Early-Stage Researchers workgroup meeting (join the WG here). Please use this link to join the meeting directly.

• Anna Ostropolets introduced a vocabulary landscape assessment survey to directly inform which vocabularies and activities the vocabulary team prioritizes in 2023. More information on this survey is posted below, and the deadline is Feb. 23.

• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.

• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.

• The CBER BEST Seminar Series returns Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 11 am ET, as 2022 Titan Award recipient Fan Bu will provide a presentation on Bayesian Safety Surveillance with Adaptive Bias Correction. More information and a registration link is available here.

• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.

Job Postings

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: A scalable framework for transforming multiple data sources to the OHDSI Common Data Model (Janos Hajagos)
Tuesday: PDA-OTA: Privacy-preserving Distributed Algorithms Over the Air, an OHDSI journey (Yong Chen)
Wednesday: It Takes a Village: Community-Driven Phenotyping to Address a Public Health Crisis (Kristin Kostka)
Thursday: Reduce, Reuse, & Recycle: Going Green with Atlas Reusables (Ajit Londhe)
Friday: Comparison of Biopsy and Diagnosis Code Based Breast Cancer Phenotypes (Matthew Spotnitz)

Slides

Presentations

Workgroup OKRs (Clair Blacketer, Jenny Lane, Martijn Schuemie, Adam Black, Patrick Ryan)

Phenotype Phebruary Week 1 (Azza Shoaibi, Gowtham Rao, Evan Minty, Andrea Noel, Anna Ostropolets)

Jan. 31: Introduction to Phenotype Phebruary (Patrick Ryan, Azza Shoaibi)

The Jan. 31 community call provided an introduction to Phenotype Phebruary. This community-wide initiative is meant to both develop and evaluate phenotypes for health outcomes that will be investigated by the community. Before the Feb. 1 kickoff, we will learn about the initiative from:

Patrick Ryan — Vice President, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Gowtham Rao — Senior Director, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.; Phenotype Development & Evaluation Workgroup Lead
Azza Shoaibi — Associate Director, Observational Health Data Analytics, Janssen Research and Development, Inc.; OHDSI2022 presenter on “OHDSI Phenotype Phebruary: lessons learned”

The video presentation and slide decks for each talk are available below.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Ines Reinecke, Joscha Siebel, Saskia Fuhrmann, Andreas Fischer, Martin Sedlmayr, Jens Weidner, and Franziska Bathelt on the publication of Assessment and Improvement of Drug Data Structuredness From Electronic Health Records: Algorithm Development and Validation in JMIR Medical Informatics.

• Congratulations to the team of Junqing Xie, James T. Brash, Cigdem Turkmen, Stefan Driessen, Giustino Varrassi, George Argyriou, Sarah Seager, Christian Reich and Daniel Prieto-Alhambra on the publication of Risk of COVID-19 Diagnosis and Hospitalisation in Patients with Osteoarthritis or Back Pain Treated with Ibuprofen Compared to Other NSAIDs or Paracetamol: A Network Cohort Study in Drugs.

• Congratulations to the team of Hao Luo, Wallis C. Y. Lau, Yi Chai, Carmen Olga Torre, Robert Howard, Kathy Y. Liu, Xiaoyu Lin, Can Yin, Stephen Fortin, David M. Kern, Dong Yun Lee, Rae Woong Park, Jae-Won Jang, Celine S. L. Chui, Jing Li, Christian Reich, Kenneth K. C. Man, and Ian C. K. Wong on the publication of Rates of Antipsychotic Drug Prescribing Among People Living With Dementia During the COVID-19 Pandemic in JAMA Psychiatry.

• DevCon is returning in 2023. After our successful first event last year, DevCon 2023 will be held April 21 within the Teams environment. Calendar invites will be sent out at a later date.

• Save The Date! The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium is scheduled for Oct. 20-22. The location and more details will be shared when available.

• There have been several recent releases from the HADES development team over the last week. Martijn Schuemie announced the release of SqlRender 1.12.0 and DatabaseConnector 6.0.0, and Chris Knoll announced the release of CirceR 1.3.0. You can read more about the new releases on this forum post.

• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.

• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.

Openings

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: Constructing vaccine vocabulary hierarchy using formal concept analysis (Adam Black)
Tuesday: OHDSI Phenotype Phebruary: lessons learned (Azza Shoaibi)
Wednesday: Adjusting for Healthcare Utilization Improves the Performance of Self-Controlled Case Series Studies using Electronic Health Records (Undina Gisladottir)
Thursday: Delirium prediction in patients with trauma and comparison of predictors across trauma center and non-trauma center (Su Jin Gan)
Friday: The OHDSI Community Dashboard: Tracking the Health and Impact of the Open Science Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics Community (Star Liu)

Slides

Introduction to Phenotype Phebruary | Community Updates

Video Presentation

Introduction to Phenotype Phebruary (Patrick Ryan and Azza Shoaibi)

Jan. 24: Collaborations for Strategic Priorities (Anna Ostropolets, Clair Blacketer, Patrick Ryan)

The Jan. 24 community call hosted an important conversation about ways the OHDSI community can collaborate to achieve three strategic priorities presented at the start of the year.

During the initial community call of 2023, Patrick Ryan shared a trio of foundational pillars that need to be strengthened to enable reliable evidence generation. In this call, Patrick joined Anna Ostropolets and Clair Blacketer to propose specific strategies to address these three priorities:

Standardized vocabularies
Standardized data network
Collaborating on network studies: “The Sisyphus Challenge”

The video presentation and slide decks for each talk are available below.

Community Updates

• Save The Date! The 2023 OHDSI Global Symposium is scheduled for Oct. 20-22. The location and more details will be shared when available.

• There have been several recent releases from the HADES development team since the start of 2023, including SelfControlledCaseSeries 4.1.0, EvidenceSynthesis 0.4.0, SqlRender 1.11.1, and Characterization 0.0.5. Thank you to package maintainers Martijn Schuemie and Jenna Reps for their leadership with these open-source tools.

• JSM (Joint Statistical Meeting) 2023 will be held Aug. 5-10 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening now, and the deadline is Feb. 1, 2023.

• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.

• Jenna Reps, co-lead of the PLP workgroup, recently shared several video tutorials of version 6 of the PatientLevelPrediction tool. The demos are available on both our website and our YouTube page.

• Thanks to Andrew Williams, Marty Alvarez, and the team at Tufts that is coordinating upcoming grant deadlines for more potential community collaborations. PAR-23-034, NLM Research Grants in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (R01 Clinical Trial Optional) has a submission deadline of Feb. 5.

• The 2023 Oxford Real World Evidence Summer School will take place June 19-23 at the University of Oxford. Dani Prieto-Alhambra will serve as a course director for a session that will provide participants with the tools and concepts necessary to plan and execute Real World Evidence studies, with a focus on the use of the OMOP common data model. More information and a registration link are available here.

• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: Development of Machine Learning models for Cancer Survival among Lung cancer patients with Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors (TKIs) treatment (Alex PA. Nguyen)
Tuesday: Analyzing the Effect of Hypertension on Retinal Thickness Using Radiology Common Data Model (R-CDM) (Chul Hyoung Park)
Wednesday: Comparing the impact of clean windows across cohorts and databases (Rupa Makadia)
Thursday: Assessing and Benchmarking Data Quality and Diversity in the All of Us (Lina Sulieman)
Friday: Moving OMOP to the cloud with DBT and Snowflake (Roger Carlson)

Slides

Standardized Vocabularies | Standardized Data Networks | Save Our Sisyphus Challenge | Community Updates

Presentations

Standardized Vocabularies (Anna Ostropolets)

Standardized Data Networks (Clair Blacketer)

Save Our Sisyphus Challenge (Patrick Ryan)

Jan. 17: OHDSI Speed Dating

The Jan. 17 community call provided an opportunity to either re-connect or meet and mingle with many new community members via our own version of ‘speed dating.’ This call had multiple sessions with different breakout rooms, so there is not a recording of those sessions.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Yue Yu, Guoqian Jiang, Eric Brandt, Tom Forsyth, Sanket Dhruva, Shumin Zhang, Jiajing Chen, Peter Noseworthy, Amit Doshi, Kimberly Collison-Farr, Dure Kim, Joseph Ross, Paul Coplan, and Joseph Drozda on the publication of Integrating real-world data to assess cardiac ablation device outcomes in a multicenter study using the OMOP common data model for regulatory decisions: implementation and evaluation in JAMIA Open.

• Congratulations to the team of Martijn Schuemie, Fan Bu, Akihiko Nishimura, and Marc Suchard on the publication of Adjusting for both sequential testing and systematic error in safety surveillance using observational data: Empirical calibration and MaxSPRT in Statistics in Medicine.

• ICPE 2023 will be held in person Aug. 23-27 at the Halifax Convention Center in Nova Scotia, Canada. The call for abstracts is happening right now, and the deadline is Feb. 13, 2023.

• All workgroups should plan to share their 2023 OKRs during a February community call. If you are a workgroup lead, please sign up for a 3:00 minute slot on one of the four calls using this form.

OHDSI Social Showcase

Tuesday: Extending the OMOP Standard Vocabulary to Include Botanical Natural Products (Sanya Taneja)
Wednesday: PHOEBE 2.0: selecting the right concept sets for the right patients using lexical, semantic, and data-driven recommendations (Anna Ostropolets)
Thursday: Adaptation and Validation of the Charlson Comorbidity Index in Administrative Claims Data Using the SNOMED CT Standardized Vocabulary (Stephen Fortin)
Friday: FeederNet (Federated E-Health Big Data for Evidence Renovation Network) platform in Korea (Seongwon Lee)

Slides

Community Updates

Jan. 10: Where Can OHDSI Go in 2023?

During the initial OHDSI community call of 2023, Patrick Ryan highlighted several community initiatives, activities and opportunities that can provide a foundation to further our shared mission of improving health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care. There were three main pillars around OHDSI work in 2023 that was highlighted: 1) standardized vocabularies; 2) a standardized data network; 3) standardized open-source tools. There was also discussion around a community-run network study in the spring, the return of Phenotype Phebruary and DevCon, and plenty more.

Community Updates

• Congratulations to the team of Justin Reese, Hannah Blau, Elena Casiraghi, Timothy Bergquist, Johanna Loomba, Tiffany Callahan, Bryan Laraway, Corneliu Antonescu, Ben Coleman, Michael Gargano, Kenneth Wilkins, Luca Cappelletti, Tommaso Fontana, Nariman Ammar, Blessy Antony, T M Murali, J Harry Caufield, Guy Karlebach, Julie McMurry, Andrew Williams, Richard Moffitt, Jineta Banerjee, Anthony Solomonides, Hannah Davis, Kristin Kostka, Giorgio Valentini, David Sahner, Christopher Chute, Charisse Madlock-Brown, Melissa Haendel, Peter Robinson; the N3C Consortium, and the RECOVER Consortium on the publication of Generalisable long COVID subtypes: Findings from the NIH N3C and RECOVER programmes in eBioMedicine.

• Congratulations to the team of Xiang Cheng, Meiling Cheng, Liyi Yu and Xuan Xiao on the publication of iADRGSE: A Graph-Embedding and Self-Attention Encoding for Identifying Adverse Drug Reaction in the Earlier Phase of Drug Development in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.

• The latest edition of The Journey, the official OHDSI newsletter, is now available. This edition includes a final look back over 2022, recent community updates, the latest video podcast, publications & presentations, and plenty more. If you don’t receive the newsletter at the start of each month, you can subscribe here.

• Thamir AlShammary, an advisor to the President of the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA), has been an active contributor to the OHDSI community for several years. He collaborates in several workgroups, including Population-Level Estimation, Health Equity and the recently-completed Vaccine Evidence WG, and has been a contributor in several important network studies. He discusses his background, his journey into OHDSI and the impact he has seen, and why OHDSI can be a difference maker in generating trustworthy evidence, tools and best practices within the community, in the latest edition of the Collaborator Spotlight.

OHDSI Social Showcase

Monday: Describing treatment with antidiabetics in patients with T2D and moderate to severe CKD across a network of OMOP databases (Martin Lavallee)
Tuesday: Examining differential measurement error in phenotype algorithms due to age, sex, and disease prevalence differences using PheValuator (Joel Swerdel)
Wednesday: Lowering the OMOP ETL Barrier for Clinical Registries (Smith Heavner)
Thursday: Einstein-ATLAS: Leveraging OHDSI/ATLAS and Open-Source Development to Support Translational Research, Data Science, and Regulatory Compliance (Parsa Mirhaji)
Friday: Federated learning for quantifying racial disparities in kidney graft failure rates using US registry data from 29,468 patients across 149 transplant centers (Jiayi Tong)

Slides

Where Can OHDSI Go In 2023? | Community Updates