Thank you to everybody who joined Tuesday’s community call, the first of our “Welcome To The Journey” sessions that included an OHDSI overview, tours of OHDSI.org and the MS Teams environment, and an introduction from Sarah Seager (@sseager), Greg Klebanov (@gregk), Mui Van Zandt (@mvanzandt) and Andrew Williams (@Andrew) followed by a Q&A session of questions you submitted.
As promised, since an hour simply wasn’t long enough to answer every question we received, we’ve answered every submitted question below. There are several links included that provide more clarity to the answers. I’m sure there are many more questions to come, but that’s the beauty of the forums. Please don’t be shy in asking.
Also, a reminder that the Feb. 16 community call will focus on EHDEN, and will include a discussion on the EHDEN Academy. This is one of the best learning tools in our community, so I hope you will join that call.
Without further ado … the rest of the Q&A! #JoinTheJourney
I’m working to map my EHR’s codes and values to the OHDSI concepts. But I have a problem: the concept I’m looking for doesn’t seem to exist / there seem to be multiple possibilities for a standard concept / I think there is an incorrect concept relationship in the data from Athena. Who to contact?
Most times, the OHDSI forums is the best place to start. In this case, posting to the Vocabulary Users group would be a good place to start.
OHDSI loves names from Greek mythology. But how do I know what name X (SCYLLA, CHARYBDIS, HADES, THEMIS, etc.) refers to? Is there a glossary or a tools/study catalog that can serve as a one-stop-shop?
We’ll assume everybody has already read Odyssey and Iliad? This is a good idea. Below are several tools/studies with Greek names. Our software tools page on OHDSI.org also gives a lot of information about the specific tools.
SCYLLA: SARS-Cov-2 Large-scale Longitudinal Analyses
CHARYBDIS: Characterizing Health Associated Risks, and Your Baseline Disease In SARS-COV-2
HADES: Health Analytics Data-to-Evidence Suite
ICARIUS: International COVID-ACE Receptor Inhibition Utilization and Safety
How often are the Athena vocabularies updated? How do I know when a new version is published?
You can download the vocabularies at https://athena.ohdsi.org/. Vocabulary releases are listed here: https://github.com/OHDSI/Vocabulary-v5.0/releases.
I’m just getting starting mapping my EHR X (Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, etc.) to the OMOP CDM. Surely others have already done this. Is there a way I can leverage their efforts rather than re-inventing the wheel in my organization?
We encourage everyone to share their ETLs of these data sources, and several in the community have done so. We also have workgroups that work to compare notes and share lessons learned; the EHR workgroup is a great place to go for this purpose and includes folks working on Epic and Cerner.
How is all OHDSI work funded?
OHDSI succeeds through the enormous dedication of OHDSI individuals who volunteer their time to the mission. In addition, the OHDSI coordinating center at Columbia University receives support from government grants, industry contracts, and other contributions to host the central environment and convey community meetings. Contributions are welcome.
OMOP is a patient level, anonymized common data structure (please correct the assumption), are the aggregated databases that are used for shared studies in a standard format other than OMOP?
That’s correct, OMOP CDM is for patient-level data. The OHDSI analytic tools conduct analysis against OMOP CDM and produce aggregate results in their own standardized structure. See this LEGEND paper for an example of a results model used for population-level effect estimation.
I am interested in joining workgroup X. How do I request access to that workgroup’s team in Microsoft Teams?
Once you have filled out this form to get access to the OHDSI Teams Environment, please fill out this form to request access to the various workgroups, chapters and studies. This
Would there be a summary of EHDEN training for nontechnical persons and real-life application samples after?
The EHDEN Academy offers a wide-range of training courses that vary in technical details. The full course catalog (as of February 2021) includes: Getting Started, EHDEN Foundation, OHDSI-in-a-Box, OMOP CDM and Standardized Vocabularies, ATLAS, Extract, Transform and Load, Infrastructure, Population-Level Effect Estimation and Patient-Level Prediction.
There have been in-person OHDSI tutorials geared to newcomers during previous symposia. Our 2019 tutorials are available here, while prior ones can be found here.
How can one start their own working group or specific activity?
Sharing your interest on the forum is a good place to start. What is the problem/existing knowledge gap that you wish to address? What would workgroup goals, objectives and intended deliverables include?
If there is shared interest from the community, we can work to create a place to get started. The workgroup would need a leader, and a regular meeting schedule within the Teams environment. There is a section in the Book of OHDSI that specifically discusses workgroups.
Are you planning any datathons this year?
We will have various OHDSI collaborative activities throughout the year, so please stay tuned on the forums, homepage, social media or our community calls for updated information. The next activity is the PIONEER study-a-thon on prostate cancer being held March 8-12.
Please keep Sept. 12-15 blocked on your calendar for the 2021 OHDSI Symposium. While we don’t know the exact format of the event, we do know it will be those dates. The main symposium will be Monday, Sept. 13.
Patrick, are your slides publicly available? i.e. can we use your slides to spread the word about OHDSI?
Patrick’s slides from the Feb. 9 community call are available here as a PDF and here as a PPTX file. Previous slides from 2021 community calls can be found on the Community Calls page. Slides from calls prior to this year are available here.
Are OHDSI data partners obliged to take part in OHDSI network studies?
OHDSI data partners are not obligated to participate in OHDSI network studies, but they are always welcomed and encouraged to do so.
What’s the best method to get help on debug packages?
Post your questions on forums under implementers, and if you find a bug, please post it on GitHub/issues.