WEEKLY COMMUNITY CALL MEETING
There will be no community call on August 5. On August 12, we will host our annual “Meet OHDSI Newcomers” community call. If you are relatively new to the community or hope to have a bigger role, this is a great opportunity to introduce yourself. Please tell us who you are and where you work, what are your research interests, how you hope to help the community, and how OHDSI can help your own research journey. For scheduling purposes, please note your interest in taking part in this brief survey.
WEEKLY WORKING GROUP MEETINGS
Upcoming Workgroup Calls – OHDSI
OHDSI SHOUTOUTS
Congratulations to the team of Christine Ramsey-Hardy, Melissa Skanderson, Janet P Tate, Amy C Justice, Vincent C Marconi, Charles Alcorn, Ronald G Hauser, Amy Anderson-Mellies, and Kathleen A McGinnis on the recent publication of Comparison of 2 electronic health record data extraction methods for laboratory tests used in the Veterans Aging Cohort Study Index in JAMIA Open.
• Congratulations to the team of Yilu Fang, Gongbo Zhang, Fangyi Chen, George Hripcsak, Yifan Peng, Patrick Ryan, and Chunhua Weng on the recent publication of CLEAR: A vision to support clinical evidence lifecycle with continuous learning in JAMIA Open.
OHDSI UPDATES
The August 2025 newsletter was published today. It includes details and resources from the 2025 Europe Symposium, information and a call to action around the FHIR-to-OMOP Implementation Guide (IG), a new collaborator spotlight with Priya Desai, July publications and presentations, and plenty more.
• On August 12, we will host our annual “Meet OHDSI Newcomers” community call. If you are relatively new to the community or hope to have a bigger role, this is a great opportunity to introduce yourself. Please tell us who you are and where you work, what are your research interests, how you hope to help the community, and how OHDSI can help your own research journey. For scheduling purposes, please note your interest in taking part in this brief survey.
• The CDM Survey Sub-Workgroup is relaunching the Landscape Assessment of Survey Data and the OMOP CDM, https://forms.gle/f18ufspAFT3jSYrk6 for the month of August in preparation for our workshop at the Global Symposium. If you have mapped survey data (in progress or complete) or plan to map survey data to the OMOP CDM and have not previously filled out the assessment or met with the workgroup we need you to complete the assessment so we can determine the state of surveys in OMOP and where appropriate share resources with the OHDSI community. If you have any questions or problems with access, email me at [email protected]. More information about the CDM Survey Sub-Workgroup can be found here Home · OHDSI/CdmSurveySubWg Wiki · GitHub.
• The collaboration between HL7 and the OHDSI community achieved a milestone recently when the FHIR-to-OMOP Implementation Guide (IG) went out for ballot in the HL7 September 2025 cycle. This Implementation Guide addresses the growing need for standardized transformations between the world’s two predominant health data standards in observational research. By establishing vetted standards for FHIR to OMOP transformations, the IG aims to create more uniformity, while reducing both the cost and effort required to generate and maintain research data warehouses worldwide.
The IG serves as a foundational “primer” for implementers, providing comprehensive guidance, best practices, and technical artifacts for transforming common core EHR data from FHIR to OMOP. It includes narrative guidance drawn from the shared wisdom of experienced developers, detailed concept mapping principles and mapping patterns. Technical artifacts include FHIR logical models representing OMOP CDM tables, machine-readable Structure Maps for transformations, and guidance for using the Echidna Terminology Server API, critical in transforming to OMOP.
Take Action: Your Voice Matters in Shaping This Standard! The ballot registration window is open through August 7, 2025, and your participation is crucial for ensuring this standard meets the real-world needs of the OHDSI community. Whether your organization is an HL7 member (with designated voting seats) or you wish to participate individually, we need your expertise to evaluate whether we’ve achieved our goal of creating a solid foundation for FHIR to OMOP transformations. Instructions for checking HL7 membership status and finding organizational representatives are available here.
• Priya Desai is a physicist by training and a data scientist at heart. As the Biomedical Informatics R&D lead of the Research IT team at Stanford University, she is passionate about the mission of building the next generation of products to leverage healthcare research and analytics. As the Product Owner for STARR, Stanford Medicine Research Data Repository, and STARR-OMOP, Stanford’s next-generation Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW), Desai is excited to be part of the vision to create a single, integrated data lake containing clinical data from different modalities, such as radiology, pathology, and bedside monitoring. Her goal is to bring clinical data from its raw state to an “analysis-ready” state and eventually make the data “self-service” in order to support the growing use of this data to derive novel insights, support patient care, and improve care quality using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches. In the latest edition of the Collaborator Spotlight, Desai discusses her career journey, the STARR-OMOP initiative, why she believes medicine mirrors astrophysics, watching her daughter enter the health data science research field, and more.
• OHDSI is now on Bluesky! You can now get updates on all community activities and see all global research through the #OHDSISocialShowcase on Bluesky.
OHDSI Social Showcase
• Research from both the 2024 UK Symposium and the 2025 Europe 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 — Characteristics and incidence of stroke and bleeding events in patients with a first-ever transient ischemic attack: a US multi-database observational study (Daloha Rodriguez-Molina)
Tuesday — Characterisation of Data Sources in the HEalth data Real World Evidence OMOP Network (HERON UK) (Cecilia Campanile)
Wednesday — Accelerating Rare Disease Diagnosis: A Patient Finder Study for Alport Syndrome Using NLP and OMOP CDM (Mónica Arrúe)
Thursday — Characterising Cancer Patients Using Real-World Data: Preliminary Insights Across 34 Cancer Types from SIDIAP database with planned OHDSI Network Collaboration (Irene López-Sánchez)
Friday — Overview of the use of Pembrolizumab for metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer patient from multi-centric real-world data (Maryna Borshchivska)
OHDSI SYMPOSIA
GLOBAL OHDSI SYMPOSIUM, Hyatt Regency, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, Oct. 7-9
• Registration for the 2025 Global Symposium including tutorials and workgroup meetings is now open! On Oct. 7th there will be an introductory tutorial during the morning session, and five advanced tutorials during the afternoon session. The plenary plus collaborator showcase will take place on Oct. 8th followed by the workgroup meetings on Oct. 9th.
OHDSI 2025 Morning Tutorials
An Introduction to the Journey from Data to Evidence Using OHDSI Lead: Erica Voss
OHDSI 2025 Afternoon Tutorials
Developing and Evaluating Your Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) Process to the OMOP Common Data Model Lead: Clair Blacketer
Using the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies for Research Lead: Anna Ostropolets
Clinical Characterization Applications to Generate Reliable Real-World Evidence Lead: Patrick Ryan
Population-Level Effect Estimation Applications to Generate Reliable Real-World Evidence Lead: George Hripcsak
Patient-Level Prediction Applications to Generate Reliable Real-World Evidence Lead: Jenna Reps
Global Symposium links:
Please Register for the Symposium Here
Please book your hotel room here – Hyatt Regency NJ
Please fill out this form if you would like to host a collaboration event Oct. 7 Morning
Symposium Homepage
The first-ever 2025 OHDSI Africa Symposium will be held Nov. 10-12 in Kampala, Uganda, and registration is open. The abstract submission deadline will be Sept. 10. Agenda details will be shared when available.
The 2025 OHDSI Asia-Pacific Symposium will be held Dec. 6-7 in Shanghai, China. The abstract submission deadline will be August 25. More details will be shared when available.
OHDSI MSTEAMS
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Please continue to collaborate in our MS Teams environment, check out the OHDSI website and forums , and follow us on all platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn to get continued updates and information on everything happening in our community
