OHDSI Israel - National Node
Local Collaboration. European Impact.
Interest in the OMOP Common Data Model (CDM) has grown markedly across Israel in recent years. Established in the summer of 2023, the OHDSI Israel Node serves as the national coordinating hub, bringing together stakeholders across the healthcare system to advance the adoption of OMOP CDM and OHDSI tools. Through targeted education, training, and hands-on workshops, the Node builds practical capacity among healthcare and research professionals entering the OHDSI ecosystem. In addition, the Node organizes social meetings and community events to foster engagement, spark interest, and welcome new collaborators into the OHDSI journey. It also promotes national and international collaborations to generate rigorous, actionable evidence that informs clinical decision-making and improves patient outcomes.
Community Snapshot
60
Mailing list subscribers
60
LinkedIn followers / Social media
2
Data partners
2
Hospital networks / active organisations
The Israel Node brings together stakeholders across the healthcare system to advance OMOP CDM adoption, OHDSI tools, and collaborative evidence generation.
Objectives
- Promote the OHDSI mission, vision, and values within Israel, while actively engaging with the European and global OHDSI community to align local efforts with international initiatives and best practices.
- Drive systematic standardization of Israeli health data to the OMOP CDM and accelerate adoption of OHDSI analytics tools across clinical and research institutions.
- Develop and deliver structured training programs and hands-on workshops that build capacity for rigorous, reproducible evidence generation from observational data, involving clinicians, researchers, and data scientists across academia, government, healthcare organizations, and industry.
- Foster collaboration on national research initiatives and establish sustained dialogue with policymakers to demonstrate the clinical and public health value of OMOP CDM standardization and OHDSI-based analytics.
- Assess adoption, impact, barriers, and missed opportunities in health organizations to guide more effective implementation of OMOP and OHDSI tools.
Gallery
Focus areas
Focus areas
- OMOP value proposition: Assessing the perceived benefits of OMOP adoption, including research opportunities, partnerships, funding, and broader impact, alongside the organizational drivers and barriers that shape adoption decisions, using structured interviews and questionnaires to enable organizations to leverage their data more effectively.
- FHIR-OMOP research: Leveraging the Medical Information Mobilization Law (2024) to explore combined FHIR-OMOP use-cases.
- Methodological advances: Testing and improving OHDSI-compatible; applying and developing few shot federated learning algorithms over the OHDSI network.
- Disease-specific areas: inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), osteoporosis.
Publications
- 2022
El-Hay T, Yanover C. (2022) Estimating Model Performance on External Samples from Their Limited Statistical Characteristics. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning. PMLR; 2022:48-62. - Abbou B, Tal O, Frenkel G, Rubin R, Rappoport N. (2022) Optimizing Operation Room Utilization—A Prediction Model. Big Data and Cognitive Computing. 6(3):76.
- 2023
Elkan M, Kofman N, Minha S, Rappoport N, Zaidenstein R, Koren R. (2023) Does the “Obesity Paradox” Have an Expiration Date? A Retrospective Cohort Study. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 12(21):6765. - Ostropolets A, Albogami Y, Conover M, Banda JM, Baumgartner WA Jr, Blacketer C, et al. (2023) Reproducible variability: assessing investigator discordance across 9 research teams attempting to reproduce the same observational study. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 30(5):859–68.
- 2024
Naderalvojoud B, Curtin CM, Yanover C, El-Hay T, Choi B, Park RW, et al. (2024) Towards global model generalizability: independent cross-site feature evaluation for patient-level risk prediction models using the OHDSI network. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. ocae028. - Azriel, D., Rinott, Y., Tal, O., Abbou, B., Rappoport, N. (2024). Surgery Duration Prediction Using Multi-Task Feature Selection. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics 28, 4216–4223.
- 2025
Yanover, C., Magen-Rimon, R., Voss, E. A., Swerdel, J., Sheahan, A., Hall, N., et al. (2025). Characteristics and Outcomes of Over a Million Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Seven Countries: Multinational Cohort Study and Open Data Resource. Digestive Diseases and Sciences. 70, 709–718. - El-Hay, T., Reps, J. M., Yanover, C. (2025). Extensive benchmarking of a method that estimates external model performance from limited statistical characteristics. npj Digital Medicine. 8, 1–10. doi: 10.1038/s41746-024-01414-z
- Rappoport, N., Livne, G., Cohen, N. P., Makover, N., Eshel-Geva, H., Kapach, H., et al. (2025). Kineret: Israel’s Largest Hospital Network Transformed into the OMOP common data model for collaborative research. PLOS ONE 20, e0334848.
- Pineda-Moncusí, M., Rekkas, A., Pérez, Á. M., Leis, A., Gomez, C. L., Fey, E., et al. (2025). Changes in use and utilisation patterns of drugs with reported shortages between 2010 and 2024 in Europe and North America: a network cohort study. The Lancet Public Health 10, e835–e847.
- Berger, O., Menashe, S., Damti Geva, S., Yakubov, R., Ben Yehuda, M., Peleg, M., et al. (2025). Lipomas are associated with a higher prevalence of metabolic syndrome components: a multicenter cross-sectional study. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne) 16, 1721570.
How to join OHDSI Israel?
Governance
- Lead Institution: KI Research Institute –
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - The OHDSI Israel Node operates under a collaborative and inclusive governance model, with KI Research Institute—a non-profit organization at the forefront of computational health —leading national coordination and activities in Israel, fostering collaboration across healthcare organizations, academia, and international partners.
- Join the OHDSI Community and select the Europe chapter: https://www.ohdsi.org/community/
- Request to be added to the Israeli mailing list / newsletter: fill out this Google Form
- Follow the Node on LinkedIn: OHDSI Israel
- Participate in open national events and working groups.
Join the OHDSI Community and select the Europe chapter:
www.ohdsi.org/community/To join OHDSI Israel, fill out this Google Form and follow OHDSI Israel on LinkedIn.
Activities
Useful resources
- OHDSI IL kick off, May 2024 (Recording: Part 1, Part 2; Hebrew)
- Atlas workshop for Rambam Health Care Campus data team, November 2025 (Agenda)
Contributing organizations (selected)
The Israel Node includes contributions from a range of stakeholders across the health data landscape. The selection below highlights active participants in Node activities, events, and working groups.
This is not an exhaustive list and will evolve as the community grows.
Connect with the national node and follow upcoming activities.