Jan. 27, 2026
The Jan. 27 community call hosted two brainstorm sessions to help move the community forward in 2026. The innovation discussion was led by Patrick Ryan, while the education discussion was led by Paul Nagy. Both sessions can be seen below.
Community Updates
• Congratulations to the team of George Hripcsak, Marc Suchard, Martijn Schuemie, and Patrick Ryan on the recent publication of Trust in Observational Research in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC).
• Workgroups will play an important role this year in both the OHDSI community and our community calls, starting with OKR announcements during the first two February sessions. Workgroup leads, please fill out this brief form to let us know when you would like to present OKRs and when/if you plan to lead a session about your workgroup.
• Registration is now OPEN for the 2026 Europe Symposium, which will be held April 18-20 in Rotterdam. Submissions for the collaborator showcase are due Feb. 6. The main conference agenda has been added to the event homepage.
• The 12th annual OHDSI Global Symposium will return to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick, N.J., Oct. 20-22, 2026. All pertinent information will be added to this page when available. Currently, the OHDSI steering group is seeking proposals for both plenaries and tutorials. The deadline for both is THIS FRIDAY, January 30, 2026; more details are available on the event homepage.
• Konstantin Iaroshovets, in collaboration with the Vocabulary team, recently shared the OHDSI ATHENA User Survey. Please help the team learn what is requested to make Athena better by filling out this brief survey.
• Discover how the OMOP CDM powers global, large-scale health research in this new “bite-sized” video learning pathway, developed in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Prieto-Alhambra’s team at Oxford University. Designed for researchers and data holders, this course explores how a standardized infrastructure enables reproducible, federated analytics while ensuring regulatory compliance.
• There is a new tutorials homepage on OHDSI.org that hosts all tutorials from past Global/US Symposia, including all six tutorials from the recent Global Symposium.
• The latest Our Journey annual report is now on the OHDSI homepage. This 134-page PDF provides an overview of the OHDSI community, including a look at its collaborators and collaborative activities, its research areas and tools, its work with standardized data and vocabularies, and nearly 900 publications that have come from the community.
• Registration is now open for the 2026 Summer School in Observational Health Data Science & Informatics, AI, and Real World Evidence, which will be held June 22-26 at the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics. Now in its second-year, the Columbia OHDSI Summer School provides health professionals, researchers, and industry practitioners with an immersive, hands-on training to working with real-world health data and generating real-world evidence (RWE). Participants will explore the types of healthcare data captured during routine clinical care—such as electronic health records and administrative claims—and learn how to standardize these data using the OMOP Common Data Model to support collaborative, distributed research as part of a data network.
Upcoming Events
• The 2026 OHDSI Europe Symposium will be held April 18-20 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and registration is open. The deadline for abstract submissions is Feb. 6, and the current agenda is available o the event homepage.
• The 2026 OHDSI Global Symposium will be held Oct. 20-22 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick, N.J.
Social Showcase
• Research from the 2025 Global Symposium Collaborator Showcase is being shared daily on OHDSI’s LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram and Bluesky social channels as part of the #OHDSISocialShowcase. Below are posters (with study leads) that are featured this week:
Monday — Mapping Transplant Cohorts at University Health, San Antonio: Custom OMOP Concepts for Donors and Recipients (George “Holt” Oliver)
Tuesday — Maximizing EHR Semantic Meaning for Rare Diseases Utilizing a Direct Mapping Strategy (Melanie Philofsky)
Wednesday — Integrative Causal Machine Learning with Digital Twins: Calibration of Treatment Effects via Negative Control Outcomes (Yuqing Lei)
Thursday — Toward Accurate Identification of Fontan and TGA in OMOP CDM: Registry-Anchored Algorithm Validation (Seohu Lee)
Friday — DarwinBenchmark: Evaluating cohort generation and analytics in OMOP CDM databases (Ioanna Nika)
Slides
Videos
Innovation Brainstorm
Education Brainstorm
