Annual OHDSI Symposium

Project Summary The Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (or OHDSI, pronounced "Odyssey") program is a multi- stakeholder, interdisciplinary collaborative formed to bring out the value of health data through large-scale analytics. All our solutions are open-source. OHDSI has established an international network of researchers and observational health databases with a central coordinating center housed at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. As a collaborative, one of our greatest strengths comes from working together with other stakeholders across the broader healthcare community. By connecting with those on the frontlines of medical decision making, we can ensure our goals are aligned with the needs of patients, clinicians and regulatory agencies. To engage with this broader audience, we propose holding an annual symposium with the objective of showcasing OHDSI’s achievements and offering hands-on training for OHDSI tools and methods. Furthermore, the symposium will provide a forum to discuss challenges facing large-scale observational research with a broad range of stakeholders, and request external feedback on how OHDSI collaboration could further foster an ecosystem designed to satisfy the needs of the healthcare community. This symposium will be a continuation of our previous symposia which has been offered annually since 2015 and hosted a wide range of stakeholder groups such as patients, clinicians, researchers, industry and government. At the event, OHDSI collaborators will present OHDSI’s vision and demonstrate our commitment to open science by sharing results from our most recent collaborative studies, carried out across our international research community. Presentations will be interactive and provide participants tangible examples of how observational data has been used to generate real world evidence about disease natural history and the effects of medical interventions. The annual symposium will give participants an opportunity to provide input on the priorities and future direction for how the OHDSI community should advance the research, development, and applications of observational research. This input will ensure the evidence generated within the OHDSI community is designed to answer the questions most important to patients, payers, providers and policy makers.