If you have followed the MediSapiens social media pages (Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook) over the past year or so, you are likely to have seen the terms EHDEN and OMOP and that MediSapiens has been heavily involved with these as the first EHDEN-certified OMOP service provider in the Nordics. But what are EHDEN and OMOP?
To start with the latter, OMOP stands for “Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership” and was originally a public-private partnership involving the FDA, multiple pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers established to inform the appropriate use of observational healthcare databases for studying the effects (risks and benefits) of medical products. This has evolved in to a widely supported, and ever-growing environment of open-source applications, data models and organizations developing, supporting, benefiting from and implementing the OMOP Common Data Model. Of significant importance in this environment is Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (or OHDSI, pronounced “Odyssey”), an international, non-profit organization that creates and maintains the open-source applications to implement the OMOP model on data.
The concept behind OMOP is to transform data contained within clinical databases into a common format (data model) and a common representation (terminologies, vocabularies, coding schemes), and then perform systematic analyses using a library of standard analytic routines that have been written based on the common format.
Benefits of the OMOP model include interoperability of data across borders, increased consistency of data sources and a standardized query model.
Within Europe, the European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN) is the driving force in introducing OMOP, through the education of companies such as MediSapiens in applying OMOP and supporting data owners to convert data to OMOP through funding and other means of support. EHDEN is supported through the EU’s Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking, which in turn receives support European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and EFPIA.
EHDEN and its members, consisting of a mix of academics, pharma and private companies have done a tremendous job in supporting the adaptation of OMOP in Europe and building a federated data network of healthcare data sources. During December 2020 it was announced that during the first three calls in 2019 and 2020 there have been so far 62 data partners, from 16 countries with over 200 million patient records, an impressive double the amount of the original target of 100 million patient records.
But how does MediSapiens fit in to this all? MediSapiens was among the first group of companies to receive training and certification applying OMOP from EHDEN and MediSapiens has been supporting several OMOP-related projects in the Nordics, including work with the Biobank of Tampere. MediSapiens work has included consultation and training regarding the application of OMOP, support in setting up the conversion environments and converting data together with data partners.
If you are interested in the OMOP model and its benefits, contact MediSapiens via sales@medisapiens.com or our contact form on our website. We will be happy to discuss the process and its benefits and can support you implementing OMOP to your data, ranging from funding applications with EHDEN to hands-on conversion and process work.
