Welcome to Vol. III of The Journey,
the official newsletter of the OHDSI Community.
It has been a busy few months for our global community, culminating in the 2020 OHDSI Global Symposium. This newsletter will highlight (and provide direct links to) presentations, panels, and research from the OHDSI Symposium Collaborator Showcase, as well as share work that has been generated by our global community over the last few months. It will also update you on upcoming events, like the 2020 Asia-Pacific Symposium.
The OHDSI 2020 Symposium brought together our global community for 18 straight hours of open science, international collaboration, and community fun.
Every presentation, panel and collaborator showcase submission has been uploaded to our 2020 OHDSI Global Symposium home page. Submissions from the Collaborator Showcase will be shared daily on our Twitter and LinkedIn feeds during the upcoming #OHDSISocialShowcase, which will start in mid-November.
Below are some of the presentations that you might be interested to watch (or watch again). Videos used for tutorials will be added to the Symposium page as well in the coming weeks, so please keep watching for those (announcements will be made on the OHDSI forums and social media when they are added).
George Hripcsak, director of the Columbia University OHDSI Coordinating Center, provided an update on the state of the OHDSI community, as well as a review of OHDSI publications over the last 12 months. Several working group leads and representatives of OHDSI collaborations also provide updates.
Plenary Session: Large Scale Network Phenotype Development, Evaluation and Characterization
Presenters: Patrick Ryan, Anna Ostropolets, Gowtham Rao, Anthony Sena, Talita Duarte-Salles, Noémie Elhadad
Members of the OHDSI community present the plenary session on Large Scale Network Phenotype Development, Evaluation and Characterization.
Panel: Building Trust: Evidence and its Communication
Panelists: Amy Abernethy (Principal Deputy Commissioner of the U.S. FDA), Patti Brennan (Director of the National Library of Medicine, NIH), Magdalena Skipper (Editor in Chief, Nature), Deborah Nelson (Associate Professor of Investigative Journalism, Univ. of Maryland) and Roni Caryn Rabin (science reporter for the New York Times)
Panelists: Vivian Lee (President of Health Platforms, Verily Life Sciences), Robyn Jones (Senior Medical Director, Women’s Health, Johnson & Johnson), Rear Admiral Deborah Hopson (Senior Vice President, Public Health Systems Innovation, MayaTech Corporation), and Subha Madhavan (Chief Data Scientist, Associate Dean/Associate Professor of Oncology and Biomedical Informatics, Georgetown University)
Moderators: Ru-fong Cheng (Senior Medical Director, Women’s Health, Johnson & Johnson) and Maura Beaton (Women of OHDSI Workgroup Leader, Columbia University)
There were more than 100 presentations of OHDSI research and collaboration at this year’s Collaborator Showcase. Please go through the posters and software demos on this page to learn more about all this exciting work. We also had 12 lightning talks as part of the collaborator showcase, and they are listed below.
Patrick Ryan closes out the 2020 OHDSI Global Symposium with thoughts about the OHDSI Journey in 2020 through the COVID-19 pandemic, introduces the Titan Awards presentation, and discusses some of the community’s proudest moments. Cheers!
The OHDSI 2020 Global Symposium was held in our new OHDSI Microsoft Teams environment. After successful collaboration using an Erasmus-led Teams environment for our COVID research, we believe this environment can positively impact all future OHDSI global collaborative research, including our ongoing COVID efforts. If you took part in the OHDSI Symposium, your Teams log-in will work for all future collaboration. If you need to get a log-in, please fill out this form.
During the Oct. 27 OHDSI call, we held a discussion about how our global community can use this Teams environment to enhance our collaborative efforts. If you missed it, use the link below to watch!
VIDEO: Learn About The Upcoming
OHDSI Asia-Pacific Symposium
The 2020 OHDSI Asia-Pacific Symposium will be held virtually over two half days on Dec. 5-6.
The 2020 Asia-Pacific Symposium will be held over two half-days on Dec. 5-6, starting at 10 am Korean time; these start times translate to the evenings of Dec. 4-5 in North America. The agenda is below, and registration/more information is available here.
We are proud to have had several network studies published recently, and four of them are listed below. In the OHDSI 2020 State of the Community address, George Hripcsak highlighted more than 50 studies from our community over the last year, so please check that out if you missed it.
Ticagrelor, when compared with clopidogrel, was not associated with better outcomes for patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) treated with percutaneous coronary intervention in contemporary routine clinical practice according to a study published recently by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community. (see full press release)
Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were more likely male, younger, and, in both the US and Spain, had fewer comorbidities and lower medication use than hospitalized influenza patients according to a recent study published by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community. This global network study, which included more than 34,000 COVID-19 patients from across three continents, is intended to provide greater detail about the characteristics of patients suffering from the disease, and also to help inform decision-making around the care of hospitalized patients. (see full press release)
Evidence derived from existing health-care data, such as administrative claims and electronic health records, can fill evidence gaps in medicine. However, many claim such data cannot be used to estimate causal treatment effects because of the potential for observational study bias; for example, due to residual confounding. Other concerns include P hacking and publication bias.
In response, an international group of OHDSI collaborators launched the Large-scale Evidence Generation and Evaluation across a Network of Databases (LEGEND) research initiative. Its mission is to generate evidence on the effects of medical interventions using observational health-care databases while addressing the aforementioned concerns by following a recently proposed paradigm. We define 10 principles of LEGEND that enshrine this new paradigm, prescribing the generation and dissemination of evidence on many research questions at once; for example, comparing all treatments for a disease for many outcomes, thus preventing publication bias. These questions are answered using a prespecified and systematic approach, avoiding P hacking. Best-practice statistical methods address measured confounding, and control questions (research questions where the answer is known) quantify potential residual bias. Finally, the evidence is generated in a network of databases to assess consistency by sharing open-source analytics code to enhance transparency and reproducibility, but without sharing patient-level information.
The combination of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin (AZM) has been linked to significant cardiovascular risks, including mortality, in the largest safety study ever performed on both HCQ and HCQ+AZM. This network study, led by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics community, was recently published in Lancet Rheumatology. (see full press release)
Co-lead authors Jenny Lane, Jamie Weaver discuss the hydroxychloroquine study published in Lancet Rheumatology.
OHDSI Obtains Grant Towards Global Research On COVID-19 Treatments
An international cohort of OHDSI collaborators obtained a grant from the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to lead an effort to compare the effectiveness of treatments, including corticosteroids such as dexamethasone, under current evaluation for COVID-19 across an international observational data network. The Therapeutics Accelerator is an initiative launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard to speed up the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling up treatments.
Researchers from the University of Oxford, Columbia University, UCLA and Erasmus University Medical Center are leading this work through Project SCYLLA (SARS-Cov-2 Large-scale Longitudinal Analyses), one of the emerging efforts to come from OHDSI’s global work surrounding COVID-19 research.
• We announced our 2020 Titan Award winners at the 2020 OHDSI Global Symposium. Those winners were Clair Blacketer (Data Standards), Nicolas Thurin (Methodological Research), Anthony Sena (Open-Source Development), Jenny Lane (Clinical Application), Talita Duarte-Salles (Community Collaboration), Dani Prieto-Alhambra (Community Leadership), and the Erasmus University Medical Center team (Community Support).
• Jenna Reps, a 2019 Titan Award recipient, will be a speaker at an upcoming Women of Data Science event hosted by Oxford University. This event is open to everybody, and registration information is available here.
• If you are looking to become more part of the OHDSI community, joining a working group is a great first step. We announce our weekly working group call schedule here, so please consider collaborating with one of these groups and #JoinTheJourney!
