Hi - First of all, I’ll introduce myself briefly, and get to posting a slightly longer introduction later. My name is Evan Minty, I’ve met several of you before. I’m a General Internist and hold some informatics related positions at Alberta Health Services, and am based (and provide the pin on the OHDSI map for) Calgary Canada. I’ve been stretching out an MSc at Stanford in biomedical informatics and have done work with Nigam Shah there. That drew me into the OHDSI orbit, around which I continue to circle.
I am continuing to make a local case to make use of the CDM and OHDSI toolset. Given my background and interests, the pitch has had a couple of angles: (1) philosophical / open science / open methods , (2) research potential / collaboration.
There is a substantial stakeholder subset in hospital administration that I think this misses. I can extend (1) to an argument around economic benefits, although anything free makes them nervous. Argument (2) tends to fall on deaf ears. References to a PNAS paper can sound shockingly Freudian to them.
There is certainly a QI program argument for OHDSI, many of the developed methods have natural applications to health system improvement. I’ve used figures from the PNAS paper to illustrate, for instance, applications in defining care variability.
I’m wondering if:
- Any of you have implemented OHDSI in an health system and used it in QI related (as opposed to research related) efforts. While I understand the health system context is different, the knowledge that it has been used in broad measurement of Quality indicators, outcome tracking (or in the US, meaningful use), could bolster my claims, even more so if you’re willing to share some specifics.
- Any of you have needed to make the case of OHDSI for QI before, (or OHDSI to that type of administrative audience before) and if so, could we chat further?
Thanks,
Evan