Competition of data sharing frameworks?

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Not sure if this is right thread but is there ‘competition of data sharing frameworks’?

OHDSI vs CDISC vs i2b2 vs REDCap vs FHIR?

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Thanks @amarcelo, I didn’t know the first three! This is a place where we’d need @ibacher’s :bulb:

Definitely yes, I would also add openEHR to the list…

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Well, all of these have somewhat different use-cases (and there are a few other more case-specific models):

  • REDCap: This really isn’t a data sharing framework per se; its a data collection framework and registry with some analysis tools. CDIS (REDCap’s clinical import service) somewhat complicates things. There are also a tool building on CDIS to integrate FHIR with REDCap and an ETL tool for exporting REDCap data to OMOP, but all of these are essentially large mapping tools for REDCap’s project-specific data models to formats that can be consumed by other tools.
  • ODHSI - From my perspective the OMOP CDM (ODHSI is the organization that publishes the OMOP CDM) is the premier framework for storing clinical observational data for secondary analysis. There have been various efforts to support mapping between FHIR and OMOP, PCORnet CDM to OMOP, REDCap, as mentioned above, and i2b2 inter alia.
  • i2b2 is certainly also a good data model that fits in many of the same spaces as the OMOP CDM (cohort discovery, analysis, federation of queries, etc.). Personally, I’ve seen less general activity around i2b2 lately than OMOP, but that may just be the limits of what I’ve seen going on.
  • FHIR is kind of in the name: “interoperability”. I think FHIR has a lot of good features related to the clear semantic exchange of individual resources between systems, but it has some pretty glaring flaws when used as a source for more “analytics” type workflows. Some of that may go away as new parts of the standard evolve and are more widely adopted (Bulk FHIR / CQL for Analytics, etc.). On the other hand, compared to OMOP and i2b2, it’s the best suited for preserving the fidelity of the data.
  • I don’t really have enough familiarity with CDISC to make much of a comment on it.
  • openEHR is in a slightly different space since it’s focus is more specifically on EMR / EHR needs rather than secondary data usage. In some ways, it has stronger data fidelity than FHIR and its a bit more prescriptive about how data are represented. On the other hand, the format is probably not as well-suited for analytics type workflows as the other frameworks, though they do mention that there are systems for exporting to OMOP, REDCap, i2b2 and CDISC…
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