Christian Reich, Andrew Williams, and I have been developing a proposal to create an “OHDSI Center” at the Roux Institute of Northeastern University. We have developed a white paper and would very much appreciate community feedback at this stage. Regards, David
This sounds like a necessary and very welcome step for a maturing community like OHDSI!
I am struggling a bit with understanding the scope of the OHDSI Center. The paper mentions the word ‘service’ a few times, e.g.
Introduce service to external institutions (private or public)
and
Develop “Member Services” that are designed to engage the OHDSI community at all levels of
involvement
Could you provide some concrete examples of such services?
And would the Center take on clinical research projects itself? What revenue streams might materialize?
This is a great idea. I am at University of Massachusetts Medical School (computational scientist in NLP and machine learning) and looking forward to collaborating opportunities within the upcoming center!
Thanks Martijn. I’ll let Christian chime in on the services. With regard to clinical studies, for sure the Center could engage with partners to conduct clinical studies. The Center would also be active seeking grant funding for methodology/infrastructure work.
An example would be the BEST job the FDA gave us. Traditionally, we haven’t done any of these, @hripcsa and the Coordinating Center are usually not offering services. The new Center would be a framework for doing it, allowing to write contracts, hire staff, passing work to collaborators, that kind of thing.
@Andrew came up with this term, but essentially OHDSI collaborators could hire help with things. Like OMOPing data, getting HADES to work, etc.
Bottom line: We could have an institution that could provide or buy services, in exchange for money or in-kind activities.
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It will be great to have OHDSI at Roux on board, especially strengthening OHDSI’s link to industry and other contracts. In the future, we may see several OHDSI centers with different foci. The most recent FDA BEST contract is an example of the Coordinating Center in this role, but @Christian_Reich is right that we have more been focused on academic funding than on contracts.
Hi George,
I am so thankful for the extraordinary good work you are all doing!
One big challenge for OHDSI is how to keep maintaining a uniformed, universal, interoperable data environment while growing up in scope.
Another big challenge is to get OHDSI to be used not only for data exchange for research, but also for patient care, by capturing accurate EHR data at the level of data generation.
Best wishes, and please keep in touch and be safe.
I’ll add my two cents as one who was involved with the development of the original OMOP business plan way back in 2005. Establishing this center fits right into what we were thinking back at PhRMA. We wanted to establish a center that could be used to conduct research and provide such services as have been outlined. In the funding proposal that was presented to the PhRMA Board to establish the OMOP proof of concept, this was noted. I’m glad to see this move forward.
Thank you @David_Madigan for your leadership, and @Christian_Reich and @Andrew for helping to move this forward. I am very supportive of this exciting new direction as we mature our approach to open community science. As OHDSI has grown its broad network of researchers and international data sources, the potential impact we all can have on public health has greatly expanded. What we’ve all accomplished this year to inform the pandemic around COVID-19 disease natural history and hydroxychloroquine safety is a great testament to what’s possible. But we’re still barely scratching the surface; most questions that need reliable evidence that matter to the patients we serve remain unanswered. To fully realize the potential of the OHDSI community, we need to begin to formalize structures that can enable directed collaborations and focus our energy toward shared objectives. I see the OHDSI Center at Roux as a great example and important milestone to move in this direction.