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Welcome to OHDSI! - Please introduce yourself

Hello everyone. My name is John Methot and I’m Director of Architecture and Product in the Informatics department at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. I met @rimma at the July 2018 AACR GENIE meeting and meeting her reminded me to investigate and get more involved with OHDSI.

My role at DFCI is to set architecture and technical strategy for Informatics and oversee product management of in-house developed software tools. A significant portion of that work involves data architecture.

My particular interests here are in the OMOP CDM for potential clinical data representation in our data warehouse(s); data delivery models for research data requests; and data exchange. I’m especially interested in the work of the Oncology Subgroup.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmethot/

Hi everyone!

I’m Mustafa, an analyst programmer and PhD student in the Clinical and Translational Science program at Case Western Reserve University. I have degrees in physiology and economics.

Oncology and cancer development related to immunosuppression is my main research interest.
I’ve worked with claims linked to kidney transplant patient data, and my current work makes use of Medicare data linked to a cancer registry.

Having done a few chart review studies, I can’t wait for a future in which the OMOP CDM is widespread! Streamlining the research process, especially with a widely-adopted standard, stands to improve healthcare by leaps and bounds.

On a separate but still introductions-related note:

@jwelsh I don’t have as much experience with OHDSI/OMOP-CDM, but speaking from a cancer registries angle: Unfortunately, metastasis identification and timing from claims data is somewhat controversial (scroll down a bit on the page here). With that said, SEER data contain information on brain metastases diagnosed during cancer staging workup (albeit from 2010 onwards), which can be related back to Medicare claims. In any case, the OMOP CDM could bypass this issue altogether depending on the data source (i.e. not claims). Don’t hesitate to reach out to discuss further! (mustafa.ascha@gmail.com)

Hello. My name is Lisa Beth Ferstenberg and I am a pharmacovigilance physician with 35 years spent in clinical trials, safety and pharma development. I am particularly interested in Learning Health Systems and how to improve post-marketing pharmacovigilance monitoring, risk identification and mitigation so that we can learn how to use products more safely once they enter the open market.

Hello everyone. I’m Jeff Millstein, a Principal Consultant at Commonwealth Informatics, previously at Oracle Health Sci., Phase Forward, Lincoln Technologies, PPD, Belmont Research, and Applied Biomathematics. An ecologist by training but have been on the nuts and bolts data side of clinical data management, drug safety, medical coding, and health insurance claims databases (building, customizing, etc.) since the mid-90s. I’ve just been asked to help set up an instance of CDM for development, followed by a migration of a 16M subject 10Tb custom database of health insurance claims (demog, drugs, events, procs, labs, etc.). I’m starting with a sample database (thanks @lee_evans) and will expand from there. Primarily work in Oracle, PostgreSQL, and some R.

Hello! I’m Michael Nossal. I specialize in natural language processing on clinical text. I currently work for cohort.ai, and previously have worked for Mulitscale Health Networks, 3M, and CodeRyte Inc. I really appreciate and admire the resources from OHDSI for harmonizing semantic concepts from disparate ontologies. I hope I can contribute going forward.

Hi! My name is John Graybeal, I am a Technical Program Manager for some semantic services at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research: BioPortal (a semantic repository some of you may have heard of) and CEDAR Workbench, a semantic metadata modeling and collection and management system.

I work on a few metadata interoperability projects that touch OHDSI space, and watching the work of colleagues in BMIR who have been doing more direct analyses related to OHDSI data. One of my key interests is in connecting the semantics of OHDSI to the semantics of other systems and of the semantic web (read: OWL, RDF, and other similar artifacts).

Hi, I’m Tyler Wilson, a dad, concerned citizen, and software developer. I’m joining this forum in the hope that I can help facilitate some much needed transparency to the US health care industry. A few months ago, my son needed a minor surgical procedure. It was tedious and exhausting to shop around for costs on this procedure and I was amazed at the wide range of prices. So, my goal is to make it easier for the next citizen to get this info. Looking forward to our conversations.

Hi everyone,

My name is George Argyriou and I work as a data scientist in IQVIA. I look forward to meet and collaborate with the community. My main focus is to get a deeper understanding of the OMOP vocabulary and also learn more about cohort and study design.

Thank you
George

Hello,

My name is Bob Hoyt and I am an Internal Medicine physician who has taught Health Informatics over the past 14 years. My current data science interests involve an open source EHR that was populated with 9600 patients and their data from NHANES (2011-2012) The remaining tables (CSV files) I uploaded to Data World for student exercises.

It seems like having NHANES data in the CDM format would make good sense. I have access to 4 NHANES data periods (41K patients) so this would be an outstanding dataset for epidemiological studies. Browsing the Forum seems to indicate that others have discussed NHANES but I have no idea what has been done so far and therefore would appreciate hearing back from others. Cheers

Hello Everyone! My name is Jami Jackson Mulgrave and I am a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. I am working with George Hripcsak. I completed a PhD in Statistics at North Carolina State University in 2018. My research involved developing Bayesian methods for graphical modeling. I am interested in furthering this research as well working in other areas such as variational inference, causal inference, and general machine learning. I’m looking forward to collaborating.

Hello @JamiJacksonMulgrave,
I’m Chan from Ajou university. We’ve already developed deep learning module in PLP package. One of my goal is developing Bayesian deep learning based on deep learning module in PLP package.
If you’re interested in this work, please let me know.

Hi @SCYou! I am interested in this work on Bayesian deep learning. Could you send me more information on what you are trying to do and the PLP package?

Hi Everyone

I’m Kwon-Ha Yoon, Professor of Department of Radiology, Wonkwang University Hospital, South Korea. I have interest to built up the Radiology CDM (R-CDM) with collaboration of Ajou University rwpark’s lab. Thank you all for the good opportunity to join this wonderful work.

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Hi there,

My name is Simon Eiriksson, and I was recently introduced to OHDSI through the provincial administration in Denmark. I have a long-term interest in health data for research purposes, specifically with respect to Danish health registries and their use in research.

I currently work as independent software developer and data analyst, and was hoping to be able to learn more about the OMOP CDM and OHDSI from this forum. More specifically, I am interested in the possibilities of transforming Danish health data to the OMOP CDM for use with OHDSI.

Hi all,
nice to meet you digitally. I am Niccolò Tempini, an information systems and science and technology studies scholar based in Exeter, UK. My specialty is in the social study of data and computation: looking at practices, organisational innovations, methods, and epistemic standards linked to the use and development of information technology. Despite forays in mobile and public administration infrastructure studies, I have been almost entirely dedicated to the study of biomedical data and computing technology.

I am introducing myself to you as I am developing an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) application, to be fully submitted in a couple of weeks time (I am sorry this is so late notice), aimed at studying machine learning application development and implementation in health contexts.

What might be interesting is that the project is aimed at developing a ‘methodological toolkit’ to better account for social and situational factors in the development and real-world/routine implementation of ML tech developed by researchers. This would leverage from observations I would acquire through established analytical frameworks from the social sciences (ethnomethodology one of them), it would revisit established ‘soft’ methodologies for problem design, and it would be co-developed with fieldwork collaborators. Recently I have also been awarded a Turing Fellowship at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science, so now the application will involve more of the ATI’s networks.

At the moment I am looking for leading organisations/teams/projects interested in collaborating on this, that I could visit to gather views on the local ML development practices and experiences, and that I could relate to, to co-produce the main proposition of the project, a methodology for anticipating and integrating crucial features of diverse social contexts that shape ML implementation in real world contexts of use. Somehow I did not know about OHDSI until yesterday, when a colleague pointed me to it. I am so impressed by the potential to converge with the interests of some of the members.

If you would like to scope the idea further and see whether there could be mutual interest in collaborating, I would love to explore this with those of you whom this is of interest. I am happy to brief you about the project in a couple of paragraphs if it is of interest, and to answer any question you may have.

I would be grateful if you could share your thoughts when you have time, and if you have any availability to discuss this. Unfortunately, time factor is pressing.

My email is n.tempini@exeter.ac.uk
Hope to hear from you.
Niccolò

Hello, I’m Robert Snowie. My background is in business Database Systems. I’m currently lead architect for a large Cohort Cancer study project in China. Specifically Lung Cancer at this time. However the tool sets we’re creating have been designed for all Cancer sub specialties. Now looking at North American, European and other continents for geonomic data cooperation. Anyone interested in that discussion, please contact me directly.

Hello, I’m Fabrício Kury, currently a postdoc at Dr. Chunhua Weng’s lab at Columbia University. I have done a few observational clinical studies myself using MIMIC and Medicare claims. I have also analyzed the financials of Medicare Accountable Care Organizations, and done a bit of work on medical terminologies (drug classification systems).
Previously I was a postdoc at the Lister Hill Center/National Library of Medicine/U.S. National Institutes of Health, after graduating in Medicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
One type of contribution I think I can make is write analytical code (R, SQL, SAS) for OHDSI-based studies, if someone needs this kind of helping hand.
Kind regards!

Hi All,
I am Michael Qiu and I’m currently a manager of data analytical team at NorthWell Health System. I have been managing the clinical database for more than 4 years. My team’s responsibility is to help researchers query, analysis and visualize on the clinical data. We are planning to covert our database to OHDSI data model to better support researchers.
And I would like to become involved in any OHDSI group involved in running studies, CDM as well as continuing to remain involved in OMOP database development, where possible.

Hi!

My name is Inês Ramos and I work as a data analyst at the  Portuguese Medicines and Health Products Authority (aka Infarmed), where I develop drug utilization studies and policies impact evaluations using primarily drug reimbursement claims .

One of my main projects at work is a study of the treatment pathways in diabetes using reimbursement claims. We hope to publish the first paper arising from this project soon.

While I was doing the bibliographic revision, I stumbled upon the paper 'Characterizing treatment pathways at scale using the OHDSI network' and thought it was an amazing endeavour. So here I am.

I am curious if we could adapt the Portuguese data to the OMOP common data model and, perhaps, participate in a future study. It would be an amazing improvement if we could benchmark the results against results from other countries.

Can you help me satisfy my curiosity? 

Icons made by Portugal from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY

Hi everyone,

My name is Miguel-Angel Mayer and I’m a medical doctor, PhD in Biomedical Informatics and Senior Researcher at the Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) at the Medical Research Institute Hospital del Mar and the Pompeu Frabra University in Barcelona (Spain).

We participated in the EU project “European Medical Information Framework (EMIF)”, where there was a very intense and amazing activity related to the implementation of OHDSI in all the EHR databases participating in this project, including our EHR information system of our hospitals.
In our lab we have worked and are working on several research projects such as cancer comorbities, Alzheimer’s disease, genotype and phenotype linking and so on, so we are very interested in running research projects in collaboration using the OHDSI tools, write research papers, etc.

Thanks for this amazing initiative!
MA

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