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Welcome to OHDSI! - Please introduce yourself

General
#81

My name is Funmilola Akinbola, I am an Irish citizen , originally from Nigeria. I study computer science in college( Dublin Institute of Technology) , i also did a post grad diploma in Data Analytic.

I am currently doing a work placement with Trinity College Dublin as a data scientist , i am working on a project called “avert”. Am focusing on a sub-product called “rear kidney disease” .

I enjoy analyzing data , discovering new pattern in historical data and most especially biological data. When am not busy with data analyses, it is either am selling or researching on beauty and fashion .

#82

As a Senior Architect with Microsoft Consulting Services, I focus on architecting and delivering large-scale complex projects on current technologies (Cortana Analytics, Windows Azure, Hybrid Cloud, Windows Azure Machine Learning and Mahout on Azure, Microsoft AppDev technologies primarily based on .NET stack, Windows 8 and Windows Phone app development, Enterprise and Government Social, IoT, Windows 8 deployments and app compatibility ,System Center, Windows Server 2008 R2/2012, FIM, SQL server and BizTalk Server), project lifecycles, and project management. I have been driving large enterprise IT and CIO initiatives for the past 7 years for large enterprise and government customers of Microsoft.
I was resident chief architect for four years on a Microsoft program for healthcare industry helping a partner build a healthcare product and deliver a healthcare solution on Microsoft platform for NHS UK

I now truly believe data is the new currency and I help enterprises and governments mine it. And, I go about telling, “let’s find and understand the context of your data”. Data as a currency is useless if we don’t get the context and only find or attach a qualitative attribute or a quantitative number to it.

Apart from technology career, I am interested in microeconomic topics related to health and education in emerging markets. On the personal front I am an outlier and enigma to physicians with obscure and rare diseases like Nesidioblastosis - hence I like to look at Pathology, Radiology and other diagnostics data reports to find if popular correlation techniques used by doctors break sometimes.
I am married to a Dermatologist and wonder how medical industry works. I kind of figured that doctors- especially specialists and super specialists are so buried in that one small organ they look at, they fail/don’t try to see the big picture and link multiple problems to identify the root cause. The challenge is medical field does not have “architect role” who can kind of look and make sense of big picture and relate it to each problem. Maybe, sometime in the future IT industry to fill gap of data-driven architect will be able to solve this problem.

#83

Hello,
My name is Vojtech and I am data scientist in Merck (known as MSD outside of the US and Canada). Before joining Merck, I was working as statistical modeller in banks and have an academic background of a physicist.

In Merck, we have a number of CDM-structured databases which come from vendors of the EMR systems. We would like to analyze them using the OHDSI tools, and my role is to do a proof of concept within the Merck IT infrastructure.

#84

Wow, I never would have guessed that the OHDSI community would be comprised
of more Vojtechs than Patricks or Georges. Welcome Vojtech #2, we’re
excited to have you!

2 Likes
#85

Thank you, Patrick - it is not the most common name, so I am really surprised to see that I am not the only Vojtech here :-).

1 Like
#86

Hello everybody of this nice community:
I am Martin Sedlmayr, computer scientist/senior researcher at the University chair of Medical Informatics in Erlangen, Germany. Our department has a long track of projects in the area of secondary use, building clinical warehouses, introducing i2b2 and tranSMART in the routine and doing many projects around these concepts and tools. My special interests are on decision support and big data technologies.
We are now starting to look into OMOP/OHDSI and from what I have seen, I am really excited. So I guess I will be here for a while and can hopefully also contribute and not only profit :slight_smile:
Cheers,
Martin

#87

Greetings all,

My name is Robert Miller and I live in Portland, Maine. For the past two years I have been part of the Health Informatics Research Cluster at the University of Southern Maine while I complete my M.S. in Computer Science. The cluster has collaborated with Maine Medical Research Institute which has given me the opportunity to work at MMCRI as an intern this summer.

Our work with OHDSI currently has three aspects: 1) EHR ETL, 2) Tumor registry (NAACCR) ETL, 3) OHDSI GIS

I have used R for most of my data science work which I would guess will also be the case here. I also spend limited time working on a reboot of the Open Health and Demographic System.

I’m excited to be working with this supportive community and hope I can contribute.

#88

Hello!

I’m Greg Cunningham. I am Director of Real World Data at Eli Lilly and Company. My role is now part of our Global Patient Outcomes Real World Evidence group. My team has two areas of focus. The first is to identify and evaluate real world data sources that we use for to answering scientific questions, secondary research, and for internal business questions. The second is to load, manage and refresh real world data sources along with developing descriptive analytics reports on this data. It is clear to me that consistent data formats allow for more efficient use of data. I am interested in learning more about OHDS and OMOP to help contribute to the use of this CDM and help evolve it to include additional data types.

Outside of Lilly, I keep busy with family activities. My passions are running/exercise and craft beer sampling!

Greg Cunningham
Eli Lilly and Company
gec@lilly.com

#89

Hello!

My name is Peng(Eric) Jin. I recently graduated from master program in biostatistics at Columbia University. Currently, I’m working as a biostatistician at Columbia University Medical Center. I used to work at the New York State Psychiatric Institute focusing on brain image data analysis. I’m very interested in doing research, and looking forward to engaging with the OHDSI community.

Thanks,
Eric

#90

Dear all,

Hello! My name is Stephen Johnston, and I am a Director of Real World Data Analytics and Research in the Epidemiology, Medical Devices group at Johnson & Johnson. I am relatively new to J&J (a little over 3 months), and prior to my role at J&J I worked for Truven Health Analytics for almost 10 years conducting a variety of observational studies using administrative claims, electronic health records, and other data sources.

I am excited to learn more about the application of ODHSI’s tools to observational studies in general and more specifically for studies involving medical devices. Ultimately, I hope to gain expertise in this subject matter and be a resource for others who seek to do the same.

In my free time I enjoy spending time with my wife and 2 daughters and I aspire to introduce my older daughter to stand up paddle boarding. Glad to be part of the community!

#91

Hello,

My name is Michael Gurley. I am a Programmer/Analyst at the Northwestern Center for Data Science and Informatics (CDSI). I have worked on a variety of clinical research/quality databases/registries. Currently, I am developing a clinical data repository for the Northwestern Prostate SPORE. I am building the data repository as a generic system with the hope to be able to apply the platform to any disease area. I have chosen to use the OHDSI/OMOP CDM as the system’s data model. The system’s name is Interleave: https://github.com/NUBIC/interleave. It is released under a MIT license.

Interleave plans to layer the following features on top of the OHDSI/OMOP CDM:

  • Multi-tenant housing of registries.
  • Enrichment of the CDM to include protected health information fields.
  • Registry-scoped configuration of datapoints and the relationship between datapoints. Dynamic display of datapoints per registry.
  • Datapoint restriction of the list of possible values of CDM concept ID values.
  • Provenance tracking per imported standardized CDM clinical entity back to source system rows.
  • Support for the incremental load of data from multiple outside source systems.
  • A user interface to allow for the creation ‘ex nihlo’ of standardized CDM clinical entities.
  • A user interface to allow for the override of externally imported standardized CDM clinical entities.

I have done prior work on NLP-aided assisted chart abstraction systems and hope to be able to apply some of my ideas to the CDM. I also have a great interest in helping the OHDSI community converge on best practices for placing oncology data within the CDM.

Oncology Treatment Proposal
#92

Hello

My name is Tom Velez. I am a serial entrepreneur and active researcher in information systems. My current passion is development of decision support tools that leverage EMR data using “deep” evidence-based semantic models that guide natural language processing, big data machine learning over multi-institutional case histories, and address workflow insertion human factors issues (Vivace Health Solutions).
Although I am not a great software engineer or clinician (my PhD degree in mathematics) I work with a great group of computer scientists and clinicians. At the moment we are exploring how to help clinicians recognize and best manage “tough”, time-sensitive acute critical care topics (e.g. detection of adult/pediatric sepsis, ARDS in ER and ICU settings) and would be happy to discuss lessons learned with the community.
I believe OHDSI can help realize a vision of profound international importance: the effective use/reuse of electronic clinical patient data towards the reduction in preventable mortality and morbidity.
(In my “spare” time I have a great family experience and enjoy playing the violin) Tom

1 Like
#93

Hello,

My name is Tim Muir and I work at Boehringer Ingelheim. I’ve worked primarily in pharmaceutical or biotech heavily on the SAS side but transitioned to translational science, epidemiology, and R. I was interested in OMOP years ago and was very happy to find OHDSI. Currently, I am looking at getting started and setting up an evironment; would like to build a scalable environment and therefore looking for technical recommendations based on experience with different configurations. Thanks in advance and glad to join the forum.

Tim

#94

Hi Folks,

My name is Nikhil Gopinath. I’m currently working in a data-analytics firm (Saama Technologies) as a Solutions Engineer. My role is to work at the intersection of our technology and business teams to design solutions around real world data sets.

I graduated out of NC State with an undergrad degree in Biochemistry, and I am currently getting a graduate degree in Biomedical Informatics at Rutgers.

My interests are in bioinformatics and nanomedicine, but recently I have been exposed to a lot of Epidemiology fundamentals (e.g. utilizing IPTW methods in Signal Refinement for Pharmacovigilance, Network Meta Analysis of Observational Studies, etc.).

I look forward to learning from this community and contributing back to it with exploration (for a master’s thesis) into various applications of the available methods and underlying data model.

Cheers,
Nikhil

#95

Hello. My name is James, and I am a mathematician. During the first three years of graduate school at the University of Maryland, I primarily focused on signal processing, and I did computational work with a team from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Health. I subsequently became very interested in a theoretical question in dynamical systems, and I received my Ph.D. in dynamical systems in 2011 after making progress on it. Over the next four years, I continued my research in dynamics as a postdoc at Rice University and the Collège de France.

Now I am back to more applied things, and I am interested in data science. I would like to participate in a working group.

#96

Hi James, Welcome! Lisa Schilling here (@schillil) . We met at Datapalooza Denver at the start of the summer. I’m glad to see you here and I hope we can work together. Lisa

#97

My name is John Meinken. I am a software developer for the Center for Health Informatics at the University of Cincinnati. Our group provides observational data from UC Health hospital to researchers at UC College of Medicine.

Our group has been a bare-bones operation for years, but we are finally starting to scale up and modernize our operations. My primary job task is building tools to give our researchers more direct access to hospital data. However, I believe that the future of medical research will involve more multi-hospital collaborations. We want to implement standards such as OMOP in all our work so that we are positioning ourselves well for the future.

#98

I’m a Real World Data Analyst at Genentech and I’m transitioning to a role as a Technical Specialist within our Medical Data Hub. Over the past few years, I’ve worked on observational analysis using claims and EMRs in our Real World Data Science group. Prior to that, I spent several years analyzing randonmized control trials for oncology in our development pipeline. I’m looking forward to learning and contributing to the OHDSI community. Thanks!

#99

Hi!
I’m Hugh Kawabata, recently retired from Bristol-Myers Squibb, where I was part of the team that used the OMOP Common Data Model for some of the analytics for real world research.
I was part of a small analytic group that did analytics internally using many of the commercial available administrative claims databases. We hosted internally the most commonly used of these databases and were able to increase our operational efficiency particularly among the less experienced analysts.

I am new to the OHDSI community (just started attending the community calls), but not new to the Common Data Model and the commonly used methods in this space.

#100

Hi,
I am Venkat. I am a high energy physicist and an IT professional. I have recently switched over to Health IT and got introduced to OHDSI through colleagues of mine at Health Sciences South Carolina. I am excited to be here and am looking forward to contributing to the dev in particular and this community in general.

You can find more about me at http://boson.physics.sc.edu/~venkat/ or on github.

t