This is a great idea Maura, and I hope everyone else will participate so we
can get to know each other better.
I’m Patrick Ryan. My day job is as Senior Director and Head, Epidemiology
Analytics at Janssen Research and Development. There, my job is to help
our company analyze observational data to answer questions about disease
natural history, treatment utilization, and the effects of the medical
products in our portfolio. At Janssen, we license many different
de-identified patient-level observational datasets (administrative claims,
electronic health records, national surveys, clinical registries), and our
strategy 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. I can hack SQL and a little R, but my team will be the first to
tell you that while my ideas are occasionally good, my code is generally
always bad (even still, there’s a few lines of code lurking in some of the
OHDSI apps that I can still lay credit to:)). Increasingly, I am
motivated to see our OHDSI tools be applied directly to real and relevant
research questions, so we don’t fall into the common informatics trap of
expecting ‘if we build it, they will come’, so you’ll probably see me
encouraging us to push through more OHDSI network research studies that
leverage our OHDSI tools to generate evidence reliably and efficiently.
When I’m not OHDSI’ing, I like to hang out with my wife and cats, golf, and
search for new hoppy beverages.