Hello OHDSI Community! I am an Obstetrician-gynecologist physician researcher at Johnson & Johnson in the Women’s Health Group. I am in charge of data insights to drive changes in the health care of women, to improve the health of women. I’ve heard great things about what OHDSI can offer. Looking forward to contributing more and learning from the community. 
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Hi everyone,
I am Christina Zhou and I am a biostatistician at Janssen regulatory affairs in Canada on RWE projects. I’m currently responsible for methodology design and data management. I did double majors in statistics and pharmacology during my undergrad at University of Toronto and then completed my master degree in biostatistics at UofT last year in November. I found out OHDSI through @jesse and Jamie Weaver who are both fantastic researchers in observational studies.
I’m especially interested in observational studies and had past experience in Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) data and EHR from hospitals on several academic studies to improve community’s willingness on living donor kidney transplant. I’m currently focusing on growing knowledge on observational studies by applying data science techniques and at the same time broaden my expertise into epidemiology to improve global health.
I code in R well, and still learning python. I’m interested in predictive modeling on early intervention or early detection of disease, as well as identifying patients of interest to improve personalized treatment. I’m also interested in learning how to use existing observational data to have an impact on healthcare policy and decision making to let more people accessible to treatments.
In my spare time, I do hiking, ultimate frisbee, photography, yoga, piano and visiting art museums. I grew up in Shanghai and is currently living in Toronto for almost 6 years.
I’m excited to join the community with all the great researchers and contribute myself to any ongoing studies to improve our healthcare systems and be able to use the results of the studies to help those in need and enhance their quality of life. I am willing to learn as much as possible and I look forward to the journey here at OHDSI.
Best,
Christina
Hi Everyone,
I’ve been following OHDSI from afar since it was formed and just started posting yesterday. I was involved in developing the original business plan for the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) when I was VP for Scientific and Regulatory Affairs at PhRMA. We started on this in 2005 and as project manager I brought it to fruition in the spring of 2008, following about 14 months of stakeholder meetings and getting the initial $20M funding from PhRMA companies. i have been a strong believer in the use of observational data to examine both safety and efficacy signals.
Along with a cohort of other retired pharma company scientists, I have been tracking both drug modeling and clinical responses to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. Most of my career was in regulatory affairs with a little bit in drug safety. I’m retired from consulting these days so I’m going to be more of an observer than a participant.
Hi all,
I’m Rohan Kodialam, a graduate student working in Machine Learning under David Sontag at MIT. My focus is on building models to help with medical prediction tasks, in particular using novel featurizations of claims data (which we’re trying to get moved to the OMOP format).
I’m very excited to work with this community – so much work in ML and data science in healthcare is underpinned by OHDSI’s amazing work in building a standardized and understandable way to store information.
We’re currently working on building a general-purpose prediction library in Python to streamline the process of featurizing OMOP standard healthcare data and pushing it through a variety of ML models – you can see our project here. If you have any interest in using such a tool, please feel free to reach out to me at kodialam@mit.edu, we’d really appreciate having community input and feedback in our work.
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Hi All,
My name is Shyju KT, I have been working in healthcare domain for last 20+ years , mainly designing and developing HIS software for Govt. & private organizations. Currently, my focus is on developing a cloud based community healthcare software which can be used by small to large heathcare facilities for end-to-end management of the facility including clinical,financial , inventory modules.
Idea is to provide a repository with REST based API’s so that anyone can develop the front end in their own way. The resulting data will be easy to port as the data is stored in a standard way which can be converted to various formats like FHIR.
I believe OHDSI CDM can help in designing the data repository in a concept based manner. Shall keep you posted the developments.
Thank you for accommodating me into this wonderful community and I really would like to contribute in whatever possible ways.
Thank you
Hi everyone,
My name is Jong Soo Lee. I’m a physician-scientist and transplant nephrologist at Ulsan University Hospital, Ulsan, South Korea. My field of study has been transplantation immunobiology for about 20 years, mainly animal experiment. Recently, I came to realize that epidemiology and cohort study are also important, and I became interested in fields such as the standardization of data. Observational research is about to begin, but there are some areas I can help with, so let me know.
Thank you
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Hi All,
I’m Youngmin Park, a Family Physician in South Korea.
I’ve been working for 10yrs at the National Health Insurance Service Ilsan Hospital, where has OMOP-CDM database of 1.3M pts.
I’ve been a lurker for a long time on OHDSI but I’ve been participating in a datathon, OHDSI symposiums and tutorials about CDM. My focus is on performing research with OMOP CDM and becoming a good collaborator of you. Fortunately, I got a chance to have an appointment as a visiting scientisit at NIH, ListerHill center for 1yr in 2020.
I’m looking forward to learning more and being with you.
Thank you!!!
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Hi
I’m Fredrik Nyberg.
Previously with AstraZeneca, but lost track of my previous account here so setting up again, including a new introduction presentation (don’t remember if I did one before…).
Currently, since early this year (Jan 2020), I am Professor of Register Epidemiology, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Institute of Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
This will involve working with, and supporting development of, Swedish registers and databases, but also engaging in international collaborations on the basis of healthcare data. So OHDSI is obviously of great interest.
In my previous role at AstraZeneca I also had started to engage with OHDSI, and was the main AZ representative on the EHDEN IMI project, that also collaborates with OHDSI and builds on the OMOP CDM.
I now look forward to engaging with the OHSI community and contributing in my new role!
Fredrik
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Hi everyone,
I am Charles Auffray, the President of the European Institute for Systems Biology and Medicine (EISBM). Information on our activities is available at http://www.eisbm.org
I am connected to OHSDI through my colleagues from the PIONEER project on prostate cancer, https://prostate-pioneer.eu
Together with the Luxembourg Center for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), we develop the Disease Map Community http://www.eisbm.org/projects/disease-maps/, which is currently fully committed to fight the coronavirus epidemic and accelerate the development of diagnoses and treatments for COVID-19 patients
I look forward to join forces with OHSDI to provide our communities with relevant solutions to overcome the current unprecedented crisis, and foster open collaborations on the long term.
Charles Auffray
cauffray@eisbm.org
Hello all,
I am Laurentiu S. from Romania. I am medical doctor, public health and management specialist. I worked as an epidemiology & prevention expert in the employees’ health management, as public health specialist in a public institution and until last month as a health data researcher (in big-data and natural language processing). I am expecting now for a position as military medical doctor.
I will let the higher ranked professionals to support in the development of the ideas. If I can contribute in any way to a project, please let me know. I will also watch the discussions here and provide an input if requested.
As a personal opinion predicting, with a very high accuracy (99%), at individual level, if the outcome will be an acceptable or non-acceptable one (mild, severe clinical outcome), is the most important thing. Maybe in the future we will be able to avoid situations like this one through a controlled human infection applied on most individuals with an acceptable clinical outcome expected.
Good luck
Hello everyone, I’m Paul Fitz and I’ve been mixing Biology and Tech for sometime now. Currently working with the Digital Experimental Cancer Medicine Team at University of Manchester and The Christie.
Looking forward to working with this community and do let me know if I can help
Hi All,
This is Jeremy Yang, staff biomedical research data scientist at the University of New Mexico, Dept of Internal Medicine, Translational Informatics Division (http://datascience.unm.edu/). In short we analyze mostly molecular (cheminformatics/bioinformatics) data, mostly for Illuminating the Druggable Genome (https://druggablegenome.net/), sometimes with machine learning, but also have experience with clinical data via Cerner systems. Looking forward to learning from the OHDSI and contributing too.
-Jeremy
@PaulFitz welcome to the OHDSI community! Definitely a lot of activities on Oncology side in OHDSI, including in CDM Oncology extension and vocabularies. https://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php?id=documentation:oncology:proposals
@jeremyjyang - welcome to OHDSI! we have been actively discussing what gene and biomarker vocabs we need to bring into OHDSI, maybe it is something you could also be interested in being involved in.
Hello everyone. I just joined the group and start my journey with you. 
My name is Hilda Mahmoudi, Research scientist, MD, MPH. My speciality is Community medicine. I got certification of “ Principle and Practice of clinical Research” from Harvard school of public health and collaborate with them for 4 years. I worked as Research faculty and educational instructor in NSU, and FIU, Florida.
My expertise are in study design and conduct, data analysis, evidence based medicine, epidemiology , critical appraisal of articles. I am looking forward to work with you guys to provide evidence based and scientific knowledge about COVID 19 pandemic to guide decision makers in this global battle.
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Hello
I am a physician with a Bachelors of Medicine and Surgery and a MSc Medical Genetics. .I have developed a passion for genomic and precision medicine. I have also developed a passion for digital health and data science. I am interested in pursuing a career in genomic data analysis, the interpretation and clinical application of genomic data - clinical variant curation.
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Hi, my name is Gunther Schadow, MD, PhD, I used to be a Associate Professor at Indiana University, Schools of Informatics, Medicine, Regenstrief Institute Investigator. I am leaving the links to my ResearchGate and SemanticScholar profiles:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gunther_Schadow
I have a long track record in medical informatics, been pretty influential in HL7, the father of UCUM (unitsofmeasure.org). Used to be co-director of biospecimen banking at IU school of medicine. I have a pharmaceutical data management company and am an FDA contractor running the HL7 SPL based listing system. There is a lot more but I am cutting it brief. During my PhD project I was at Anesthesia and Intensive Care Unit at Benjamin-Franklin Hospital in Berlin-Steglitz, Germany. That was over 20 years ago. At the time, that place was one of the world leaders in ARDS, I think there are still “Berlin Criteria”, etc. So, I have some background in some ICU patient care and before that, even before going to medschool, in geriatrical nursing.
I am residing nowadays in Latin America, Panama, Paraguay, and Brazil. And for that reason I am less keen on high-tech methods and more keen on practical public health interventions which can be deployed quickly to protect the vulnerable population. I am of the strong belief we must QUICKLY come down to an anti-viral treatment that can meaningfully reduce the time of disease and the shedding, and can be deployed in MASS, NOW, ASAP, ideally allowing self-treating over-the-counter all suspects and their contacts so as to slash the R-naught value to naught.
I am very connected to the poor and vulnerable population here, and I am highly aware of the deep problems with reliance on governmental public health. In Brazil, for example, the public health approach in this crisis is perilous and reckless driven by the President here undercutting all efforts by the health ministry, even again this weekend organizing a mass gathering where just another 1000 CoViD cases will be spread. That same President is denying the health ministry to use HCQ for all patients to try to speed up hospital discharge. And I know why he is denying it: because he and his corrupt friends personally confiscated and then sold all stock of HCQ in Brazil to the USA. I know this because I have been on the case on the day it happened. My pharmacist friend saw the orders all cancelled, his distributor said the Government took all stock, and on the same day the health ministry said the Government had “donated” the HCQ to the USA. That press briefing video was later censored / deleted of YouTube, so there is no record of this. But they don’t have enough HCQ in the country because they corruptly sold it, someone in the US FDA must have waived through the delivery, and someone must have received and paid. Brazil has no own API production for HCQ and relied on China and India imports, and India has total export constraints, not able to produce enough for its own looming domestic catastrophe. The world market is dry.
Anyway, this experience has really opened my eyes to the urgent need for non-governmental global research and collaboration networks such as this.
I have contacts into the favelas in Rio, and I know there is a huge amount of occult cases. I know the health system is completely unprepared.
The problem is huge. And the economy is hurting globally. Wealth, retirements, livelihoods are being destroyed. We MUST work faster to devise an existing drug that can be pushed ASAP. The best candidates I can see are:
- HCQ+azm - problem is massive shortage. The world market is dry. India has export ban on HCQ. The world can produce no more than 80 ton of HCQ API, and this is barely enough if you had a perfectly efficient distribution. But that doesn’t exist. Governments stock-pile. I think that none of the studies so far have used the right dosing.
- Ivermectine - could be a game changer, but the dose required is 20 times the usual dose. This alone can create a shortage again, besides being a bit iffy from a safety perspective. But we need bold action to speed up the studies. There is existing evidence for the safety and ethical use of IVM in high dose even if that is not for the direct benefit of the patient (malaria).
- Favipiravir - could work, it is not available widely, but then all other drugs are in short supply. This one needs to be made by creating little plants that the people could run in their countries.
I don’t see any other viable drug right now. The others are just even less well known as to their safety profile and even harder to be available in sufficient quantities.
I am interested in RAPID DATA and I think it’s ridiculous that everyone “announces” studies which are scheduled to deliver results in 2 months. I also think we need more people self-organized studies, because the governments are in the way of actually rolling out a working treatment that can stop the pandemic. This isn’t even a matter of money. The 150 million USD that a total onslaught with HCQ+Azm would cost is peanuts, but the governments, regulators are in the way. Even if we had all the data ready showing that it could work well enough.
“Could work well enough” is the operative term here.
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Hi, Gunther.
What’s your email, mine is mshapiro@xcures.com. Would love to connect and discuss.
Mark
Gunther, as someone who has been working with OpenMRS in many of the most underserved areas of the globe, I would also be interested in your perspective. We are trying to coordinate at the point-of-care with organizations like AMPATH, PIH, MSF, etc. Direct links with the field using applications like ODK and CommCare and backend reporting with DHIS2. Have you checked openmrs.org out?