Support for OHDSI

We fulfill OHDSI’s mission through building large-scale analysis of observational health databases for population-level estimation and patient-level predictions. We are deeply committed to our core principle that the products of our work – all of the tools we develop and all of the evidence we generate – should be made open-source and freely available to everyone.

Unfortunately, it costs money to make knowledge free, and financial support is necessary to sustain this effort. Some of us provide our time as in-kind contributions to the collaborative. Others are seeking support to facilitate their contributions to the collaborative through a variety of funding sources such as public government grants, industry contracts, private foundation grants and other opportunities.

Interested in providing support to OHDSI?

There are a few different ways you can provide funding to the OHDSI collaborative. Perhaps the most straightforward approach is to provide an unrestricted grant to the OHDSI central coordinating center at Columbia University. The money would go to providing the foundational support for the entire collaborative, and would be used to support personnel and shared infrastructure.

You can also directly fund a specific body of work under grant or contract with any of the OHDSI collaborating organizations. For example, if you are particularly interested in seeing the development of HOMER advanced, support could be used to fund programmers and other staff to get that application into production. In cases when the project requires collaboration between institutions, one institution could be the lead investigator group and coordinate subcontracts with other participating institutions. In terms of order of magnitude of support, the types of funding opportunities that the teams are actively soliciting usually involve direct costs paid per year with a 3-5 year commitment. The length of commitment is particularly important, as most projects involve an academic collaborator needing to make a sustained commitment to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or other research staff. The majority of the funding goes to direct cost associated with personnel, but money may also be allocated to technical infrastructure and licenses.

Another opportunity to contribute would be to fund the acquisition or licensing of a patient-level databases that can be placed within the OHDSI central coordinating center infrastructure and used for analysis. For example, you may have an interest in learning more about how to use a new de-identified EHR dataset that a commercial organization licenses to researchers. OHDSI could be a safe place to bring those data into a central environment. There, standardized analytics will help you understand what types of questions that data source can reliably address. Typically, a de-identified patient-level database would carry a license cost paid per year or over the course of a project, and that cost varies substantially by the data source. There would be additional resources needed to host the data and perform the data standardization necessary to learn from the data.

Again, an important point to reinforce is that, in all of these situations, you would have a direct contractual relationship with an OHDSI collaborating organization; there would be no third-party entity acting as middleman and taking a second-level of indirect overhead expenses from your contribution.

Reach out to any of the OHDSI collaborators or email [email protected] and we will be happy to discuss next steps.

Acknowledgements

OHDSI collaborators would like to acknowledge and thank financial support provided by the following organizations: