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Welcome to OHDSI! - Please introduce yourself

General
#820

Hello OHDSI community,

My name is Anhar Alhussaini; I am a Royal College fellow in internal medicine and cardiology with advanced echocardiography and cardiac intensive care training. I am currently enrolled in an online Master of Education in the Health Professions at Johns Hopkins University. I also completed a one-year online certificate program in Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership (SQIL) at Harvard Medical School, cohort 2020-2021.

I developed an interest in informatics and artificial intelligence due to my academic interest in decision-making under uncertainty in critical care. I learned about the community when attending a grand round by @Patrick_Ryan, “Large-scale evidence for a learning health system: Lessons from the OHDSI network” at Johns Hopkins, and I saw a great opportunity to learn and collaborate. I started enrollment in EHDEN Academy, and I am also working on expanding my knowledge in informatics beyond basics after finishing SQIL. I wanted to incorporate the idea of big data to inform the decisions and predictions in decision-making under uncertainty.

In terms of how I can help out, I can spread the news about OHDSI in my professional and social circles; I can offer my medical education knowledge to develop and evaluate programs and courses. I bring the perspective of critical care and cardiology and what I learned in SQIL. I would like to be involved in research papers in cardiac and critical care.

Sincerely
Anhar

#821

Dear all,

my name is Andreas Halbleib and I live and work in Germany. My background is biomedical engineering.
Currently, I work for a MedTech company in Regulatory and Medical Scientific affairs, with the focus on co-creating a data catalogue for demonstrating the safety and performance of medical devices - based on real world data. The catalogue shall be a consensus between manufatureres, clincis and notified bodies.
Of course I am not alone on this task but work within the AIQNET.eu project, where we favour FHIR.
Later on, when we have some nice structured and interoperable data :wink: , we want to transform these data to evidence…but there is still along way to go.
Looking forward to many fruitfulldiscussions with you.

Best regards
Andreas

#822

Hello, I am Eduardo Arenas, Computer Engineer, I am currently working in the administration of an electronic health record of primary care. I work in a network of family health centers in Santiago of Chile, which is managed by Ancora UC, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. I am new in OMOP CMD, I am studying how to migrate some data to provide standardized data for scientific research.

Best regards,
Eduardo

#823

Hello Eduardo,

Allow me to introduce myself, I am Russ Davis and the Chairman of H2CI Holdings. I am currently in Maceio, Brasil. H2CI has several major TeleHealth initiatives around the world. This year we have begun the data analytical functions and intend to expand collaboration internationally against the vast patient data our systems has produced and that is available.

Would your centre be interested in discussing possibilities of joining up our research activities for your facility and accessing other RISS patient data? This would not be as a cost centre but rather for your significant revenue production in addition to the global applied research opportunities.

Can we arrange an initial call to discuss possibilities via WhatsApp, FaceTime, SIGNAL, or SKYPE?

My Spanish is very poor but I can have others in my staff also participate who are fluent in Spanish if you are not comfortable with English.

Best regards,

Prof Dr Russell W. Davis
+55 82 9113 9086

#824

Hello there!

I work at the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center at the clinical informatics unit. We began implementing OMOP with the help of RS21 a few weeks ago, and specially keen to see how other institutions and groups are using it in the oncology realm. Hi all!
Inigo San Gil

#825

I retired in July, 2020. Before that I was CMIO at the county health system in San Jose, California and before that, an internal medicine hospital-medicine specialist and medical director for IT at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA – yup, the site of the first commercial CPOE system in the US, launched in 1974.

And before that, I was a software engineer, got interested in medical applications of computers, did a masters in medical information science at UCSF (finished in 1983, wrote my masters project in MUMPS), then decided to go to medical school and residency. I loved working as a hospitalist, but I also loved working on software projects at various levels, including writing code.

One of those projects happened in the early 2010s – I got involved with some students and a computer-science professor at UC Santa Cruz. We set out to begin working on open-source software for capturing school health assessment data in underserved rural areas … and decided to create a software version of this which created HL7 CDA documents. We didn’t finish that work, but using our prototype, we brought back 1700+ CDAs from a school we worked at in rural Ethiopia, I came to believe heartily in standards in health care, and the open source approach!

Before retiring, I had several projects going to leverage the data we had in our EHR at the county for quality improvement. I even found myself writing SQL code, and creating dashboards for our clinical leaders.

For the past year, I’ve been looking to get involved in something that brings all of these things together, and it could be that OHDSI might be the right “place.” Glad I found you, and looking forward to taking on some data collection and analysis projects, possibly leveraging the HL7 FHIR API!

#826

@strongpc Obtuse insider question: Was your Master’s project on STOR with QWOK?

#827

Hi all! I’m Dilvan Moreira, I am an Associate Professor of computer science (University of São Paulo). In my lab we are interested in using ontologies and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to allow domain experts (physicians, nurses, etc) to create biomedical data applications. We are using OMOP to create ontologies to describe patient data.

#829

Hello Everyone,

My name is Jeffrey Sweeney. I am an Assistant Professor within the Business Information Management Group, Technology and Operations Management Department, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (The Netherlands) :blush:. My research interests lie at the intersection of Information Management (how to protect personal information when aggregated for common use), Process Management (how to improve human- and technology-driven information processes), and Knowledge Management (how to create novel knowledge via the transformation of information processes). I have a professional background in software development, systems integration, and infrastructure management. I have prior experience across various business contexts, and have worked within international organizations. I am an active member of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), and belong to the AIS Hospital and Health Care special interest group. I am an advocate of Open Science, Citizen Science, GDPR, and FAIR data principles.

My current focus is on designing ways to improve public health processes. Mainly by using digital health technologies to facilitate a proactive (and equitable) response to epidemiological signals. I lead a citizen-science based research initiative, which has the purpose of informing the next generation of digital heath technologies. I hope to contribute to the OHDSI community by helping design ways to integrate citizen-science based health data sources, broaden analytic capabilities to proactively detect epidemiological signals, and inform the improvement of public health processes. Although I do not see much in the forums about citizen science and related topics, this approach seems to be compatible with the OHDSI mission: “To improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care” and follows the OHDSI value of innovation: “Observational research is a field which will benefit greatly from disruptive thinking. We actively seek and encourage fresh methodological approaches in our work”.

If you would like to talk in person, please feel free to send a direct message, email, or connect/reach out via LinkedIn. I will also take part in upcoming meetings/workgroups when possible, and look for opportunities to join ongoing initiatives. I hope you are enjoying your holidays, and wish you the best for 2022!

Warm regards,
Jeffrey

#830

Nice to meet you, Jeffrey! Your background and research topics are impressive. Great to have you joining us! I represent The Hyve, a Dutch based scale up advocating for OHDSI (open source software, open science and FAIR). On behalf of them all, let me say that I am sure you will make a great addition to our community.

We have extensive experience working with academia and research hospitals. Feel free to reach out or give us a holler on the forums, when you find something interesting to chat about!

Best,
RB Gallo

#831

Continuing the discussion from Welcome to OHDSI! - Please introduce yourself:

Hi everyone,

I am Kimmo Porkka, a professor of clinical hematology at University of Helsinki and head of department at Helsinki University Hospital Cancer Center.

I am leading the clinical team responsible for the OMOP conversion of our hospital datalake (3.1+M records in the person table), the first production version completed 6 mo ago with the help of an EU EHDEN grant and EHDEN-certified SMEs. I am also co-chairing our national initiative of OMOP conversion of all university hospital datalakes for federated analytical work.

My main research interest personalized treatment of hematological cancers using deep molecular and functional profiling data (ref), involving integration of large datasets/patient (e.g. exomeseq/WGS/RNAseq) to harmonized clinical datasets for predictive analytical work. Would be very happy to contact to people interested in similar issues. Also looking forward to getting familiar and hopefully contributing to the oncology/hematology branch of the OHDSI OMOP community.

#832

Hello folks!

I am John Brussolo, Academic Integrations Manager in the Health Information Technology & Services department at Michigan Medicine.

We are undertaking the journey to deploy OMOP so that we join in the broader community of exciting clinical research that relies on the OMOP CDM. We have a PCORI and i2b2 instances live already and are eager to add this one into the tool belt. My team will be focused just on the deployment of the environment and will probably run queries against it in service of clinical network requests. We are an Epic shop and have Clarity access that we need for ETL.

I have read through, yet not fully digested of course, the Book of OHDSI. I have looked at the github repository as well. I seek to leverage everyone’s hard-earned experience so that we can make the deployment experience as rich, quick, smooth, and lesson-free as possible. I am looking for a high-level to detailed Epic to Oracle (probably) on-prem (likely) ETL and technology stack primer so my team can accelerate their education about the actual technical work that will be required for this exciting opportunity. I am sure some of you have ideas on this :wink:

I look forward to working with the community and advancing biomedical research through the use of OMOP and OHDSI tools.

Best regards,

John Brussolo
jsbrusso@umich.edu
Manager, Academic Integrations
Health Information Technology & Services (HITS)
Michigan Medicine
University of Michigan

#833

Hi everyone,

My name is Haleh Amirian. I was a general surgery resident and now a postdoc in University of Miami. Our lab focus is on pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer. My personal interest is health disparity.
I am very new to OHDSI and still learning how to work with and analyze the data in N3C for our project in Acute Pancreatitis and COVID-19. Hope to learn from everyone here and be able to help the community.
Also any data analyst experienced in working with OHDSI and N3C is welcome to collaborate with us.

Best,

Haleh Amirian, MD, MS
sxa1412@med.miami.edu
Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Surgery
University of Miami, Miller SOM

#834

I am Tony Solomonides. I joined the mad world of US healthcare after a UK-based academic career in computer science and medical informatics. At one end of the scale I worked on a Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN, at the other I set up a basic PC-and-paper driven prompting system for type II diabetes patients to visit their GP (that was 1986!). I have spent many of my 10 years in the US working, first in the PCORnet world and then the CTSA world. I have advocated for OMOP at my place of work, but it is one of many competing priorities and progress is slow. I am enjoying working with this community and trying to contribute where I can and where there is at least some synergy with my day job and my N3C activities. I’ve been active in the Health Equity WG. I upvoted Heart Failure for Phenotype Phebruary and would love to join a group who know what they are doing to help develop it.

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#835

Hello!

My name is Bill Anderson.

I am just starting to get involved in data exchange and am eager to learn more. I have worked with GE, Philips, Medtronic and other companies over the years in the US. I am interested in seeing patients benefit from the data that they contribute to research and finding ways to incentivize them to provide more complete, and timely data. I’d like to be involved in work to improve access to care, ensure that all people are included in research and help to increase trust in medicine.

#836

Hello everyone, my name is Robert.

I am a general dentist currently in the applied health informatics program at Johns Hopkins. I am interested in improving the ecosystem of observational research in dentistry. I do not have much experience with the OHDSI/OMOP/CDM environment, but I am ready to learn more and grow the community of dentists within this field. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Hope to meet and learn from you all soon!

1 Like
#837

Hey everyone!

I’m Niru and I’m a student in Johns Hopkin’s master of applied health informatics program. My day jobs include working as an Epic analyst for One Brooklyn Health and managing health tech implementations at Updox. I’d like to get more involved with “omopifying” data so if anyone has any opportunities, please let me know!

You can reach me at nmurali2@jh.edu

Thanks!

#838

Hi Niru! I just joined too!

#839

Welcome Niru and Robert,
Let me know how I can help.
:slight_smile:
Stephanie

1 Like
#840

Hello everyone

My name is Amira, Project manager for OMOP implementation at UTSW in Texas. We are at very early stages of starting to adopt OMOP CDM at our sites. We use Epic as our EHR, I would love some input on what I should be looking out for or where should we kickoff the OMOP implementation from since we have data in Clarity and Caboodle model at our sites.

Please advice. My email is Aamirah.Vadsariya@utsouthwestern.edu

Thank you

t