2018 OHDSI SYMPOSIUM

Project SummaryThe Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (or OHDSI, pronounced 'Odyssey') program is amulti-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 ofresearchers and observational health databases with a central coordinating center housed at ColumbiaUniversity’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. Despite the growth of the OHDSI program and relatedresearch, many potential stakeholders are unaware of the OHDSI collaborative or how the open-sourceanalytic tools the OHDSI community has developed could support their own research and decision making. Toengage with a broader audience, we propose holding a symposium with the objective of raising awareness forOHDSI, and offering hands-on training for OHDSI methods and tools. Furthermore, the symposium willprovide a forum to discuss challenges facing large-scale observational research with a broad range ofstakeholders, and request external feedback on how OHDSI collaboration could further foster an ecosystemdesigned to satisfy the needs of the healthcare community. This symposium will be a continuation of ourannual symposia offered in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The annual event is open to all stakeholders, from patientsto clinicians and researchers to industry and government representatives. At the event, OHDSI collaboratorswill present OHDSI’s vision and demonstrate our commitment to open science by sharing results from ourcollaborative studies, carried out across our international research community. Presentations will be interactiveand provide participants tangible examples of how observational data has been used to generate real worldevidence about disease natural history and the effects of medical interventions. The symposium will giveparticipants an opportunity to provide input on the priorities and future direction for how the OHDSI communityshould advance the research, development, and applications of observational research. This input will ensurethe evidence generated within the OHDSI community is designed to answer the questions most important topatients, payers, providers and policy makers.