Welcome to OHDSI! - Please introduce yourself

[acnash (Anthony Nash)]

Hi all,

A very quick into. I’ve only just heard of OHDSI from having attended the 2019 Epidemiology Oxford Summer School. I’m impressed!

I am a senior scientist at Oxford University working on drug repurposing using clinical datasets (CPRD), transcriptomic datasets (LINCS1000 via CMAP) and pretty much any mathematical technique from Life Sciences all the way into Chemistry.

I’m a mathematical chemist (quantum chemistry and molecular dynamic simulations) via my PhD, interested in diseased protein folding; an epidemiologist when at Oxford; and finally a professional software developer having learned the trade in industry. My original higher education was in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Computing, with a very strong focus on the mathematical theory behind Artificial Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computing.

My day job at Oxford entails a tremendous amount of R/R-shiny & MySQL development (including API development to encourage general purpose use) to help us better understand the long term behaviour of drug prescription and clinical diagnosis of migraine sufferers. I’m combining this with informatics from CMAP and PubChem where possible.

I feel most at home when combining techniques from across the sciences and developing in Java, R, C/C++, Fortran and SQL (and pretty much any other language under the sun). I like the idea of becoming involve in any OHSDI group involved in science software development. In particular, I have a personal interest on work with a focus on restless leg syndrome.

Anthony

[shiliuswgch (Liu Shi)]

Hi everyone, I’m Liu from Oxford University. I attended the summer course held in Oxford organised by prof Daniel Prieto-Alhambra last week, through which I knew Patrick Ryan and OHDSI. It is a fantastic platform and I’m amazed by the whole idea. Hopefully we could work together in the future.

[Osaid (Alser)]

Hi

This is Osaid Alser from NDORMS, University of Oxford. I’m a medic from Palestine with interest in surgical epi using large databases from NHS England (HES, ONS … etc)

I got to know OHDSI from the Oxford Real World Epidemiology Summer School here in Oxford

Lovely to e-meet all of you

Cheers
Osaid

[MauraBeaton]

Welcome @acnash, @shiliuswgch and @osaid! I hope you can all join us for the next OHDSI community call on July 9th.

Details here: https://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php?id=projects:ohdsi_community

[franzj]

Hello OHDSI!

My name is John Franz and I am a Senior Director-Research Data on the Scientific Computing team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. I lead teams of Data Analysts, Data Engineers, and Developers to accelerate scientific discovery at Mount Sinai by providing researchers with high performance computational and data services along with the human expertise for efficient and effective use of these resources. As part of these teams, we provide the Mount Sinai Data Warehouse and associated Data Marts, Research Application Portals, and other custom developed research applications.

The Mount Sinai Data Warehouse (MSDW) portion of my team has an ecosystem of data products and services which now includes not just our internal MSDW but also i2b2, TriNetX, and many related data marts. To add to that ecosystem, we have an OMOP CDM and OHDSI tools migration well underway and expect to complete this soon (in Q3 2019).

I am particularly interested in the OHDSI suite of tools and also vocabulary mappings from our custom data model to OMOP CDM and would love to discuss this with others and help out in this area. We’ve also been working on NLP initiatives and would love to collaborate in this area as well.

Best regards,
John

[krfeeney (Kristin Kostka, MPH)]

Welcome to the community @franzj! Sounds like a great effort going on at Mount Sinai. I work for @Christian_Reich helping to enable folks in the US, Canada and Latin America in their journey to implement the OMOP CDM and OHDSI tools.

If there’s anything I can do to support Mount Sinai, let me know. As @Rijnbeek says, you’ll never walk alone in your OHDSI journey.

NLP wise, you may want to check out @HuaXu and @noemie’s NLP work group (NLP Workgroup Discussion Thread + Wiki Page: projects:workgroups:nlp-wg [Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics]).

[yzhang (Yi Zhang)]

Hi My name is Yi Zhang. I’m a senior researcher at a nonprofit outcomes research institutie mtppi.org. At MTPPI, my main role is designng and conducting studies using large electronic health databases and advanced statistical methods. In the past 12 years, I have been working with causal inference methods for the appropriate design and analysis of observational data. Most of my work has involved the use of Medicare claims databases as platforms for CER on safety of treatment exposure among dialysis patients and others with chronic medical conditions.

I look forward to collaborating with OHDSI researchers!

[chrisjryan (Chris Ryan)]

Hey folks! My name is Chris Ryan, I am a data scientist at TrialSpark working with EHR data. I’ve been interested in working with medical data for a long time. I have a PhD from UC Berkeley where I used computer simulations to study how things in cells self-organize, and have been a data scientist for the past 5.5 years. I’m just getting to know the OHDSI community and joined on recommendation from a colleague, so I’m looking forward to learning more about all the work that has been done and all the open problems left to work on. The first meeting I expect to join will be the NLP meeting.

[krfeeney (Kristin Kostka, MPH)]

@chrisjryan meet @Patrick_Ryan (who is coincidentally Patrick J Ryan) – fuzzy matching some OHDSI friendship here in name alone.

Joking aside, welcome to @chrisjryan and @yzhang! You’ve completed step 1 of joining the OHDSI journey by introducing yourself. Next up: join a Tuesday community call (more info here: projects:ohdsi_community [Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics]).

[Mark (Mark Seal)]

Good day, my name is Mark Seal. I work at Cherokee Health System where currently I wear many hats as an interface specialist, SQL admin and software developer. Currently I am automating the ETL process from the NextGen EHR into the OMOP format and loading it to the All of US program using C# and TSQL.

In my former life I was a back end developer and data architect for USSI, a Meter Data Management enterprise software company, leveraging Java, Scala, Python and PostgreSQL.

When I am not transforming coffee into code, I am out on a Disc Golf course, hiking or gardening.

I learned of this forum when I met @Christian_Reich and @krfeeney at the HRSA conference this past week.

[julie_kohler (Julianna Kohler)]

Hello everyone! I’m a long time lurker but am hoping to get more involved in my new position. I’m a Senior Health Information Systems Specialist (contractor) with the U.S. Agency for International Development. I’m working specifically on HIV and will be assisting our country teams with design and deployment of health management and reporting systems–possibly including but not limited to EHR systems, community health outreach systems, and more general district and provincial level reporting systems. I look forward to contributing to the OHDSI journey and seeing how the incredible work OHDSI has been doing can translate to improving the health of some of the world’s most vulnerable inhabitants.

[miwal (Michel J.F. Walravens)]

Hi Maura,

I found OHDSI just 10 some hour ago and have the strong feeling that I should become a member. I am a Rheumatologist, retired since three years. My focus has always been autoimmune systemic diseases, in lab and hospital. I also co-founded the Belgian-Flamish Ligue for Chronic Inflammatory Connective tissue Diseases (= auto-immune systemic diseases). Besides this I was vey interested in electronic data registration and programmed my own EPR. Finally, medical terminology and ontology got my special interest because “conditio sine qua non” for good data registration, communication and analysis. But as a day has only 24 hours, my terminology activities only started since I retired as a clinician. I started translation work as a volunteer for the Belgian Snomed NRC. As I saw the immense work that must be done to translate the all Snomed database, I decided to write a program to support this activity. When some months later I joined the Belgium Snomed consortium, they asked me to go on with that program. Since 10 months we are running a POC in Dutch and French, and we hope to go for the real thing probably sept-oct.

This is in a nut shell how I am involved in medical terminology.

Looking to your organization, I find an environment that has the possibilities to get a better idea about the exact position of Snomed in the global terminology environment and also to meet people for fundamental discussion of basic issues, so often overlooked by hard workers, and ending in regrettable build-in defects, often difficult to correct.

What I can bring to OHDSI? I do not know yet, but I hope you and others will clarify this question in the time coming. I surely will be glad to discover it!

Best regards

Michel Walravens

[Christian_Reich]

@miwal

Looking to your organization, I find an environment that has the possibilities to get a better idea about the exact position of Snomed in the global terminology environment and also to meet people for fundamental discussion of basic issues, so often overlooked by hard workers, and ending in regrettable build-in defects, often difficult to correct.

@miwal: Welcome to the family. What SNOMED problems are you alluding to? It’s perfect!

I am leading the vocabulary group, and having more hands on deck to diagnose problems and fix them sounds wonderful to our ears.

[ahandu (Archana Handu)]

Hello Friends,

I am Archana Handu and currently a BI Developer in analytical team at Penn State Health , Hershey. I have been working mainly on Qlik Projects. our main initiatives so far were for Revenue Cycle & Quality & Safety teams.

I am focused on learning machine learning and applying such skills in upcoming projects.

Thank You.

[Kate_Weber]

Hello, all.

I am Kate Weber - I am a Sr Data Analyst for the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. What started as a side project to try to extract concepts from our (largely text) health histories with NLP tooling has turned into an all-consuming interest in consistent, computable ways to represent that information. I am especially keen on using graph database tools alongside machine learning technology to investigate communities of patients.

I need to bolt this information to a source of consistent truth and have been flailing at UMLS in general and SNOMED-CT/RxNorm in particular. They, in conjunction with OMOP, seem like an ideal foundation for our budding clinical data warehousing efforts. But now you can see how scope is blowing out of control.

I hope to watch and listen and get a good foundation in OHDSI’s tools so I can build the second draft of my Health History dataset over them. I feel as though I’m barely treading water but am optimistic that everything will lock together and make perfect sense. Soon. Probably. Until I realize I didn’t get it at all and have to rinse and repeat again.

Regards,

Kate

[krfeeney (Kristin Kostka, MPH)]

Welcome @ahandu! I was just at the NCQA Digital Quality Summit last week with @bnhamlin. We’re very eager to grow the “OHDSI for Quality” world. As you get your feet wet, let’s make sure we stay connected. Hope to see you on an OHDSI community call soon!

Welcome @Kate_Weber! This is a fascinating and timely initiative. I have some friends in the NLP space who are dabbling with OMOP for dental data. Perhaps there is an opportunity to ring fence likeminded folks into a working group that can help share expertise? I remember @Vojtech_Huser and @benomark were dabbling in OMOP for dental data as well. Seems like a great place to grow the community. Let us know how we can support you!

[Kate_Weber]

@krfeeney YES PLEASE!!!

[Anu_Gururaj]

Welcome, @Kate_Weber to the OHDSI community. I just wanted to point you to the NLP WG (https://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php?id=projects:workgroups:nlp-wg#) which is looking at the use of textual information from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for observational studies under the OHDSI umbrella. The group meets monthly and may be a good community to work with as you go through your project.

[Eva_Joseph]

Hi everyone… Happy to join this forum… I am a Magento Ecommerce Website developer.

[priya (shravani priya narra)]

Hello Everyone,

My name is Shravani Priya and I am an experienced ETL/Informatica Developer with Health Care Data. I had recently graduated from Villanova University. I am very much excited to start my work with Odysseus Data Services Inc as a Big Data Engineer from United States. I shall be mostly working on ETL code Development. At this point of stage I shall be learning more from the community, rather than contributing. Looking forward to learn and collaborate with you people.