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 Methodology in JMIR Medical Informatics.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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. More information and registration links will be posted when available.

• 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). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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: 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) 

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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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. More information and registration links will be posted when available.

• 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). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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: 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)

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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. More information and registration links will be posted when available.

• 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). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.

• 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 8, 2023.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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: 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

WGs: Clinical Trials | Vaccine Vocabulary | Medical Devices | Education | FHIR & OMOP | Medical Imaging | Perinatal and Reproductive Health Group | Patient-Level Prediction
Others: Phenotype Phebruary Wrap-Up | Community Updates

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)

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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. More information and registration links will be posted when available.

• 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). Submissions are now open for the APAC Symposium, and they will close March 31. More information can be found on the homepage.

• 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 8, 2023.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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: 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

WGs: Early-Stage Researchers | Healthcare Systems Special Interest Group | Eye Care & Vision Research | Oncology | Latin America | Psychiatry | Health Equity | Community Updates

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)

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

• 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.

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

• #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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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!

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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: 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

WGs: China Chapter | Natural Language Processing | ATLAS/WebAPI | Registry | CDM Vocabulary Subgroup | Dentistry | APAC Steering Group | GIS | Community Updates

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)

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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!

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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 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

WGs: CDM | Data Network Quality | Surgery & Perioperative Medicine | HADES | Methods Research | Open-Source Community | Steering Group | Community Updates

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)

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Openings

• 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

• 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: 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)

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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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: 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) 

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.

• 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.

• 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 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

• 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.

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

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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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: 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

Video Presentation