OHDSI Germany

Who we are 

Founded in Spring 2021, OHDSI Germany is now part of the worldwide OHDSI community and belongs to OHDSI Europe. We bring together experts in medicine and informatics from research and industry in Germany to form an interdisciplinary and cross-sector interest and working group. 

We aim to empower German clinicians and researchers to develop and use best practices and lessons learned to participate in international studies of the OHDSI network. For this we offer a platform to share and discuss approaches, tools and methods as well as to collaborate on new research. 

We are happy to collaborate with other working groups from OHDSI and share best practices to learn from each other.

Background 

A literature review on the existing publications on OHDSI/OMOP done  in February 2021 on the last 5 years (publication submitted at GMDS 2021) showed a steady growth of publications since 2016. 10 publications from German author teams have been identified. All of them are related to data mapping, architectural concepts introduction or tool development. By now there is no participation of German University Hospitals utilizing inpatient data in OHDSI network studies. Though two German data partners from Germany have joined the European project EHDEN for  mapping data to OMOP, still not participation in OHDSI network studies exists. Hence it is crucial to investigate the reasons and blocker in more details and to empower the German research community to join international network studies initiated by the worldwide OHDSI community.  

Objectives

1. Establish German University hospital research network on OMOP for OHDSI
   1. Generate own study pipe + integrate the pipeline into the structure of the German Medical Informatics Initiative 
   2. Participation in EMA studies and other international studies 
2. Create and share deliverables
   1. OMOP infrastructure for German hospitals 
   2. ETL processes 
   3. Vocabulary extension and improvement 
   4. Provide German synthetic data for demos and testing 
   5. Data quality solutions tailored for German requirements
3. Found a German OHDSI multi-stakeholder interest group
   1. Involve German local stakeholder 
   2. Provide guidance to those who want to participate 
4. Administrative work in terms of German data security laws and ethics
   1. Exchange of data protection concepts, data use requests and applications to the ethics committee 

Scientific Work 

to be added

Participation and Contact 

 You can find latest news, working groups and chats in the MS Teams Workgroup OHDSI Europe. 

 Join our monthly OHDSI Germany Call:  

Every first Tuesday of the month 06:00 pm to 7:00 pm CET 

Contact us directly

Michele Zoch, 
Research Associate,  
Carl Gustav Carus Faculty of Medicine,
Center for Medical Informatics,
Institute for Medical Informatics and Biometry, 
Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Ines Reinecke, 
Research Associate, 
Carl Gustav Carus Faculty of Medicine,
Center for Medical Informatics,
Institute for Medical Informatics and Biometry,
Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany, 
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.