OHDSI Study Nurture Committee

[SCYou (Seng Chan You)]

Colleagues,
I want to start the OHDSI Study Nurture Committee, as we’ve discussed about this in the OHDSI Steering Meeting.

• Background

  • @schuemie described the reason why OHDSI needs the Study Nurture Committee nicely. Briefly, we are aware that it is very hard to complete the OHDSI study, though it’s very easy to start.

@schuemie

Could we have an OHDSI committee that, upon request, can review a protocol, provide guidance, and help run a network study across the OHDSI network? Basically, it would ‘nurture’ the study from rough idea to completion.

Leading an OHDSI network study is very hard, and currently only a few in OHDSI are capable of executing a network study start-to-finish. Also, data sites might hesitate to run a study that doesn’t have some OHDSI stamp of approval (whatever that may mean). Perhaps this committee can also prevent multiple groups working on the same research question in isolation.

• What is the roles of the OHDSI Study Nurture Committee?
  The OHDSI Study Nurture Committee will do

  • Help to complete the OHDSI study

    • Mentors in Study Nurture Committee will not help researchers to start OHDSI studies. Rather, we’ll train and guide people to complete OHDSI studies.
    • Mentors will help people to use OHDSI tools appropriately.
    • Mentors will provide a guideline of the OHDSI study for better reproducibility and reliability
    • Mentors will help people to find data partners for OHDSI network studies.

  • Prevent redundant OHDSI studies

    • As @schuemie pointed out, multiple groups are aiming to conduct the OHDSI study on the same research question in isolation.
    • The Study Nurture Committee does not have any authority to regulate or organize multiple research projects. This is why the name of the committee is the OHDSI Study Nurture Committee, not the OHDSI Study Committee. But researchers can share their projects and experiences through the Study Committee, which might be helpful to prevent duplicated studies and facilitate collaborative researches.

• How does the OHDSI Study Nurture Committee work?

  • A researcher who needs help can apply to the Committee as a Mentee through personal message or mail to me.
  • A committee meeting will be held on the request of mentees. Currently, this committee is led by me and I am usually available from 6 PM EST to 9 AM EST (7 AM ~ 10 PM Korean Time).
  • Currently, this meeting is led by me and @schuemie. We’re recruiting the volunteers for Mentors. If you’re interested in this effort, please let me know!

• What should researchers prepare to be a Mentee?

  • Again, this committee will help to complete the study, not to start the study.
  • A researcher should prepare a protocol of the study. A simple and brief one would be fine.
  • A researcher should prepare basic R / SQL code or R package generated by ATLAS to apply as a Mentee.
  • A researcher should be accessible to one or more CDM DBs. Basically, it’s possible to create and conduct an OHDSI study without accessible DB, but it’s not easy to refine the protocol and complete the study without accessible data.
  • A researcher should have basic skill for R and git.

If you have any question or comment, please write it down on this thread.
Thank you!

[Daniel_Prieto (Daniel Prieto-Alhambra)]

I believe this is a very relevant initiative. Happy to join the committee if you want me. I can bring epi and academic leadership, not much in terms of R/programming as I don’t do this myself much anymore (to my despair…)
Let me know

[SCYou (Seng Chan You)]

@Daniel_Prieto I’m really happy to hear that you’re willing to join this committee. So welcome!

[krfeeney (Kristin Kostka, MPH)]

@SCYou Consider me a Mentoring resource – especially for testing the feasibility of a study package prior to disseminating to the network. I’m currently doing this with a few investigators and learning a lot in the process.

[yzhang (Yi Zhang)]

That’s great, Kristin. We’re relatively new to OHDSI. Can we set up a conference to chat about our potential collaboration? We’re available this week any time.

[SCYou (Seng Chan You)]

Cool, @krfeeney So thankful!

[Vojtech_Huser (Vojtech (Vojta) Huser)]

I am happy to help as Mentor for the things I have medium to expert knowledge.
At the same time, me and Sigfried would like to apply for Mentee help with this study. https://github.com/Sigfried/HivDescriptive . We just recently were able to get FeatureExtraction features running and hope to create custom covariates or custom table1 configurations.

Also, can Nurture committe help with the skeleton study idea. This would help many Mentees.

[SCYou (Seng Chan You)]

@Vojtech_Huser Thank you for volunteering! It’s helpful a lot.

About the HIV description study, I sent you a mail to ask further information.

Also, can Nurture committee help with the skeleton study idea. This would help many Mentees.

Yes, I agree that this will help more Mentees and newbies of OHDSI. After cumulating experience and more mentors (volunteers), we can think about expanding the role of the Nurture Committee.

[Sigfried_Gold]

Thanks, Chan! I’m looking forward to working with the OHDSI Study Nurture Committee and am starting to feel nurtured already!

[Patrick_Ryan]

This is a great initiative, thank you very much for your leadership @SCYou! I will be happy to participate as a mentor if I can be useful, I expect I’ll learn as much as I’ll give back, so I’m quite excited about this!

[SCYou (Seng Chan You)]

Thank you @Patrick_Ryan for joining this committee. I’m so relieved now

[edburn (Ed)]

Please count me in as a potential mentee!