HL7 and the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) have announced plans to create a single common data model. The organizations will integrate HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and OHDSI’s Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model to achieve this goal.
OHDSI’s common data model specifies how to encode and store clinical data at a fine-grained level, ensuring that the same query can be applied consistently to databases around the world. OHDSI (pronounced Odyssey) has chosen data integration standards that dovetail with those of the U.S. government and the international community, and it also supplies tools and mapping tables for converting data from other standards. In one example of its use, the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) accepts data via multiple data models and transforms them into a common OMOP analytic model during data harmonization.
Ann Arbor, Mich.-based HL7 and OHDSI will align their standards to capture data in a clearly defined way into a single common data model. They said this would allow clinicians and researchers to pull data from multiple sources and compile it in the same structure without degradation of the information. This allows the clinical community to define the elements they need, then package and share them in a consistent single structure.
Founded in 2014, the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) initiative grew out of the successful Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP). OHDSI is a multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary, open-science collaborative to bring out the value of health data through large-scale analytics. With hundreds of researchers from 30 countries and health records for about 600 million unique patients from around the world, OHDSI seeks to improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care. OHDSI’s data network is based on its OMOP common data model, enabling federated analytics amongst collaborators.
In a press release, OHDSI’s coordinating center director, George Hripcsak, M.D., M.S., noted, “We are excited to have the OHDSI community join this partnership with HL7 to evolve community standards around observational research and clinical care. These standards set the foundation for our mission of global, open-science research, and this partnership will accelerate the development of effective and safe treatments for diseases facing today’s global population.”
HL7 International CEO Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D., said in a statement that “the Covid-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to share global health and research data. Collaboration with OHDSI is critical to solving this challenge and will help our mutual vision of a world in which everyone can securely access and use the right data when and where they need it.”
