Hi. I’m Rich Forshee. I work at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA. I lead the Analytics and Benefit-Risk Assessment Team in the Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. I’ve done a lot of work with observational data over my career, and my team and I are currently working to estimate vaccine effectiveness using CMS data (among other projects).
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Hi, I’m Ray Grimaila. I work in the Data Center of Excellence at GSK in the Data Curation group to make datasets more accessible to R&D. Currently working with Genetics, Clinical, and ODA datasets. I am new to the OHDSI community.
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Hi all,
I am Jauwairia Nasir from Pakistan, a recent EE Masters degree graduate from KAIST Korea with a specialization in motion planning for mobile robots and cognitive architectures for service robots. My research interests have widened with a deeper interest in applications that lie at the intersection of AI and Healthcare. OHDSI seems to be one of the best platforms for this. I am amazed by the collaborative work being done here! 
I am new to this community and after having attended OHDSI symposium and a tutorial this year, im particularly interested in ETL process and Patient-Level Assessment of Treatment Outcomes. Would love to learn more!
Also, could anyone let me know if there is any work going on databases from South Asian region?
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Hello All,
My name is Fraser Gaspar and I’m an epidemiologist/biostatistician in the MDGuidelines department at ReedGroup. I work on health informatics tools, as well as independent research involving factors that influence healing time, opioid prescriptions, guideline adherence, and healthcare utilization variability. I work with large medical claims databases mainly using the R statistical software.
I’m mainly interested in collaboration on common research projects. I have access to lots of data and love to work with people to solve problems.
I live in Colorado and like to ski, play hockey, and chat over a beer.
Thanks,
Fraser
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Hello!
I am a software and data warehouse developer and entrepreneur. I began my technology career in Silicon Valley working with Ralph Kimball on his first data warehousing startup, Metaphor Computer Systems. I started CallBack Software in 1985 and developed one of the first multiuser Customer Relationship Management Systems. I got involved in healthcare in 1999 working with Dr. Shawn Murphy on the Research Patient Data Registry, which was the prototype for i2b2. Since 2005 have focused on improving healthcare and medical research through better use of data. I was cofounder of Recombinant Data Corp, which helped academic medical centers implement i2b2 and SHRINE, and which developed tranSMART, a genomic analysis platform based on i2b2. Recombinant was acquired by Deloitte in 2012 (it is now known as Converge Health). In 2016, I founded a non-profit, the Autoimmune Registry, which is a national registry for autoimmune diseases modeled on the National Cancer Registry. We have deployed a data collection platform for autoimmune disease patients and a registry where researchers can use i2b2 to discover cohorts. Please contact me if you are interested in autoimmune disease!
This year, I started a new company, Prognosis Data Corp, which seeks to create Learning Healthcare Systems that can improve the lives of patients while using technology to efficiently and effectively direct resources to those who need them. We are developing our solutions using OMOP and OHDSI tools and we look forward to contributing to the OHDSI project.
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Hello,
I’m a software/ETL developer at Washington University St Louis.We’re participating in a PCORnet project and have been using OMOP for a couple of years. We’ve recently been evaluating “i2b2 on OMOP”, which would be a boon to us if successful. We’re currently trying to find the best way to create the i2b2 search paths that are used to search the fact tables. Getting the ontology is one thing. Creating the hierarchical path is proving to be an interesting challenge! 
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Hi all,
My name is Roman Tsyvine, and for over 20 years, I have worked as a software engineer, technical architect, and team leader, primarily building enterprise, cloud-based solutions for medical research organizations at Elekta (MRS->Impath->Impac->Elekta).
These systems have included treatment planning tools for radiation therapy, brachytherapy and radiosurgery, as well as workflow automation software to support the full spectrum of cancer care.
In March of 2016, Elekta close this project and I joined IT America with the same goal in mind: continue to expand my dedication to the medical information technology sector, a field that I care deeply about.
I worked with data (patient data particularly) all my life and I’m a big believer that collecting and unifying patient data is a critical component of the quality of healthcare and this data needs to be analyzed to further provide the best and most proper care for people especially now, we the data exchange is so easy available to both sides: patient and hospitals/doctors.
I thought about joining OHDSI team for a while and now is a perfect time to become a part of it.
Thank you for what you do! Looking forward to learn and participate!
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Hi there!; I’m in charge of the clinical and biological data in a biomedicine company. We are currently very keen on OHDSI CDM. I’m preparing the enviornment to do the ETL with postgres DB but before I have some questions regarding Achiles and the other applications that allow to perform the data analyzes. Wanna see what is capable to do this set of tools which seem very attractive.
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Hello OHDSI community members,
I am Eran Or and have been in the pharma/biotech scene in Boston for over ten years. I got introduced to OHDSI by a veteran citizen. I am very excited about the possibility of using OHDSI expanding data base of real world clinical evidence to pose new questions and improve human health. I will channel my enthusiasm toward the newly formed genomics data group.
In my free time I try to keep abreast of new developments in human health, read about astronomy and keep in shape 
.
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Hi, everybody
I’m Ignacio Fernandez Criado, from Buenos Aires Argentina. I’m an internal medicine physician who is astonished of the future we will be reaching in medicine in the next years. While I was in Medicine School at UBA, health was only for a group of professionals; nowadays there is a great interest in a lot of industries about healthcare and I am sure that the interdisciplinary view will definitely improve population’s health.
I know nothing of programming but a bit of medicine and careing of sick people. Always looking forward to learn and ready to help giving a healthcare everyday worker point of view
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Hi, I am Tammi Lasky, a pharmacoepidemiologist working as a consultant in Baltimore, MD. I’ve heard Patrick speak about OHDSI and I attended the Symposium this past October. I am excited by the whole concept of OHDSI and using Real-World Evidence to improve the ways medications are used in children. The potential to improve the health of children is especially great because it is often more difficult to do a clinical trial in children, and because we usually have small numbers of children with a given condition or disease, so collaboration is essential.
My “children” are grown and would take issue with being called children, and neither one followed me into science. My interests are on the quiet, contemplative side - hiking, sketching, knitting, and the like. Am trying to come out of my shell, a little!
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I’m Bob Kirk. I work as Manager of Database Administration/Analytics at Einstein Medical Center. There, my job is to manage a team that preforms ETL and analytical analysis on observational data from various sources. This is an opportunity to start my journey on delivering answers to questions about disease natural history, treatment utilization,
At Einstein, we utilize many different patient-level datasets (administrative claims, electronic health records, clinical registries), and my goal for achieving our mission is to transform
every database to the OMOP common data model and to adopt the use of OHDSI’s open-source tools as the foundation for our evidence generation process.
In terms of how I’d like to help the OHDSI community: I really like to design and rapidly prototype novel analytical solutions (both back-end statistical modeling and front-end interactive visualizations) that can meet specific evidence needs that I see within my company and across the community.
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My name is Dan O’Leary and I work with medical device and regulations.
My primary interest is mathematical and statistical techniques for post-market surveillance. In particular, techniques that help the device manufacturer recognize issues from production and post-production data.
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Hello everyone
Nice to meet you all.
My name is Rachel and I am an Oncology Pharmacist.
I worked as a Pharmacist in UK, HK and as a aid worked with Medecins sans Frontieres. Currently I am working for IQVIA as a Oncology Subject Matter Expert.
As a front-line healthcare professional, I strongly believe in the OHDSI’s vision on better healthcare and I would like to support whenever possible.
With my user experience on various regimen set and EPR providers in Europe and Asia, my interested would be on the development of oncology module in OHDSI.
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My name is Ben Hansen. I’m a (soon to be) retired US expatriate Data Scientist in Europe. I’ve got a professional interest in analysis and a personal interest in healthcare.
I would like to begin learning about OHDSI and to see where I can participate.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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Hello,
My name is Cynthia Sung. I’m an adjunct Assoc Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School Health Services and Systems Research Program and also a consultant to the Health Sciences Authority, the Regulatory Authority in Singapore for health products. I am a Medical Engineer by training and my research has been related to clinical pharmacology (PK/PD modeling, drug discovery & development).
I am inspired to join OHDSI after having the privilege of attending several lectures by Prof Rae Wong Park, Dr Seng Chan You, and Dr. Dahye Shin from Ajou University, as well as Mui van Zandt from IQVIA on CDM conversion and applications.
I am very excited about being part of the ODHSI community and the potential to advance knowledge about drug safety in Singapore, especially because rare but very serious adverse drug reactions need a large volume of data to reach meaningful conclusions. Using EMR data also gives us the chance to better understand the benefit:risk profile of drugs in the local population, since Asians are usually not very well represented in clinical trials used to gain approval. I also appreciate that only programs and aggregated results are shared, not the data, because of laws around personal data protection.
I’m just getting introduced to the wealth of information here, so I’ve lots of reading to do!
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Welcome! @CSung
I’m really grateful to you and your team for every effort to make Singapore to join OHDSI!
I’m Natalie Bareis and started a Post-doc at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University in July. I am an epidemiologist with a focus on psychiatric epidemiology and more generally how effective medications and other treatments are for individuals with serious mental illness. I am particularly interested in OHDSI because of the wealth of information it can provide. I’m the first person in my division to use the ATLAS search engine and have been having trouble downloading de-identified person-level data. For example, I want to know how many people with schizophrenia are in the dataset that I’m using and want to download their information for all different types of analyses that cannot be done with the estimation and incidence programs on the website. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Hi, Natalie, and welcome. In general, Atlas won’t download information. You can only do analyses within Atlas. But you can use Atlas to figure out what cohort you want and what is available, and then go to your institution’s analytics group and have them download that cohort separately. The Columbia clinical data warehouse group is an example. And we hope to add more functions to Atlas in the future.
This is extremely helpful! Thanks for the quick response!