A huge amount of methods research is taking place in OHDSI, and I’m very happy that a lot of this research crosses institutional and geographical boundaries. But this begs the question: how best to collaborate and coordinate? Because I think that collaboration and coordination are the key to accelerating our combined research efforts. I truly believe the whole can be much greater than the sum of the parts.
We have the Patient-Level Prediction Workgroup and the Population-Level Estimation Workgroup, each having separate meetings once in a while, but I’m not entirely happy with those. Most of the time, at least in the PLE meetings, it has been me talking and presenting some half-baked idea, and although I get a lot of value out of that, it doesn’t meet the goal of collaboration and coordination. I think @Rijnbeek and @jennareps have similar experiences in PLP.
I find that bilateral meetings, just focused on a specific topic (e.g. a PhD student’s research) is much more effective in terms of getting work done. So I definitely want to have more of those, but these tend to be closed to the public, so not in line with our open science philosophy.
One idea I’d like to propose is to merge the PLP and PLE meetings, to have a single methods research meeting on a regular basis (still one per hemisphere). I would also like to ‘push’ more people to present their unfinished research in these meetings. For some reason, for ‘public’ meetings people are incredibly reluctant to present their ongoing work. Often when I ask someone to present at a PLE workgroup meeting, the response is “Maybe in 2 months, when the paper is done”. But I would argue we would all benefit from discussing research much earlier than that.
Sorry for the rant. Looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say, including @Daniel_Prieto, @Rijnbeek, @jennareps, @msuchard, @hripcsa, @chenyong1203, @Nicole_Pratt, @SCYou, @David_Madigan, @nigam.
