Team:
I hope you all had relaxing holiday breaks, have reflected on 2014, and have come back recharged and ready to do big things in 2015. I’m extremely excited for the year ahead of us in OHDSI. Hopefully, 2015 will become known as the year of reliable scientific evidence!
Over the break, OHDSI reached another important milestone: another open-source application, HERMES, was released! Congratulations to @Frank for leading this development and reaching this significant accomplishment. HERMES is a web application that allows search and exploration of the OMOP Vocabulary. As you all know, the Vocabulary is a foundational element of the OMOP Common Data Model, and much of the power in standardized a data structure is establishing a common language that can be used to represent our source data and enable higher-order classification of concepts in our key domains, including conditions, drugs, procedures, and measurements. While @Christian_Reich and his team have done a remarkable job of managing the vocabulary process and making it as easy as possible for developers to use, one of the key challenges is how to expand the value of the vocabulary to the non-technical audience. I think HERMES is a huge step in that direction, enabling all users within the community to have easy-to-use, point-and-click access to find concepts, browse relationships between concepts, review descendant concepts that belong to classes, and monitor how source codes have been mapped into the standard vocabularies.
During tomorrow’s call, we’ll demo the HERMES application so can see all the cool things you can do with this tool. And thanks to @jon_duke and @lee_evans, we’ll even provide OHDSI collaborators a link to a live version of HERMES so you can play for yourself, before installing it in your own shop! http://ohdsi.org/web/hermes/index.html
I suspect we’ll have a lively show-and-tell around HERMES, but as time permits, I’ll also provide an update on the first OHDSI study of chronic disease treatment pathways, We’ve seen some extremely exciting results from our first pass from several data partners, and are looking forward to getting additional results from anyone else who’s interested in participating before writing up our findings. Without spoiling the ending too much, a key takeaway: patient heterogeniety: it’s real and it’s spectacular!
It’s been about 3 months since we shifted over all of OHDSI’s community activities to our current framework, where all code lives in http://github.com/ohdsi, all documentation and workgroup activities resides on http://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php, and all discussions take place here on forums.ohdsi.org. We’d love to get feedback on how you all think it’s going so far. What’s working well? What’s not going so well? What materials are you looking for that you can’t find? What are you working on for OHDSI and how can we help you share your work with the rest of the community?
Cheers,
Patrick