OHDSI Home | Forums | Wiki | Github

CDM + THEMIS User Guidance and ETL Conventions

Based on the OHDSI Symposium 2019 closing talks and reprised in Patrick’s presentation on Dec 17, in order to promote wider adoption of CDM v6.0 we need to mature and document our understanding of the OMOP Common Data Model. As it stands now, the wiki has been useful but one of the common themes I see throughout many forum posts and github issues is frustration with the current descriptions. Most concepts are listed as “foreign key to the CONCEPT table” with no guidance on how to use the field or what type of data should be in it.

The introduction of the data quality dashboard and its underlying structure offers a way to explicitly link guidance documentation, specifications, and quality checks. Moving through 2020 we will take advantage of that linkage by focusing more on documentation and less on additions to the model by merging the THEMIS and CDM WG together. This larger group can take will the following form and directive:

Twice monthly meetings

  • 1st Tuesday of the month at 1pm est
  • 3rd Tuesday of the month at 9am est

Each month will focus on one or two CDM tables

  • Examining current documentation field by field
  • Recommending any rewrites to the user guide
  • Pulling all relevant github issues, forum posts, and decisions made on those posts to be displayed on the CDM page
  • Clearly stating all ETL conventions for each field and how holders of different data types can transform their data into each field
  • Adding to the existing data quality checks to evaluate as many ETL conventions as possible

Please join us as we take on this task! All meeting details can be found on our ohdsi wiki page or our new CDM website. All materials for this effort are available on our google drive. We have been working since November 5th with the PERSON and OBSERVATION_PERIOD tables and we will pick back up on January 7th to finish them out.

Thank you,
Clair, @Christian_Reich, @Patrick_Ryan, @MNairn

1 Like
t