OpenMRS and OHDSI

Development
1

Julianna, do you have an OHDSI database you work with? I manage the CIEL concept dictionary and also work with OHDSI. I’d love to formalize the relationship between OpenMRS and OHDSI in a reference implementation…

2

Hi Andrew, I wish I did! I haven’t convinced any of my countries to make the jump to OMOP yet, but I also would love to formalize the relationship between OpenMRS and OHDSI. What countries do you work with? Perhaps if we tag team, we can get more traction.

3

I support lots and lots of implementations through CIEL, but don’t have direct access to their data!

4

@akanter: a member of the OHDSI community named Lee Evans (evans@ohdsi.org) developed a standard ETL script to move between OpenMRS and OMOP CDM in the past year. I haven’t laid my own eyes on it, but there’s also some work some of us did as well:

https://wiki.openmrs.org/download/attachments/84476300/OpenMRS%20ETL.docx?version=1&modificationDate=1436743360000&api=v2

1 Like
5

Thanks, @paul! This is helpful. I have been following OHDSI for some time, but finally managed to get to the user conference this year. Lots going on and it would be great to have OpenMRS more involved in their data network. I think the ETL probably needs some refinement, and the tricky bits are the specific OBS that have to be moved around. Looks like you might have been working with Christian on some of that. I will reach out to Lee.

6

I actually worked with Patrick Ryan directly on this… he came to RG a number of years ago and was keen to see a strong interrelation between OpenMRS and OHDSI.

In the meantime, I helped OHDSI develop their mission, vision, and values statements and I support them as best I can behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, the concept might have been a little green at the time given that most implementers were more focused on building successful primary users of clinical data (the care workers taking care of patients) and it was hard to get them excited about secondary observational data work at the time.

I think that might be starting to shift now.

7

I could see the benefit of your work in their organization on display :slight_smile: They still need some help with the unconference style, but overall they are doing amazing work. I will talk to Lee this week and see where we are now. I think having a tighter integration on the terminology and modeling side would be great to getting more OMOP versions of OMRS out there. Now that AWS is spinning up implementations easily, it would be nice to have something for low resource settings to leverage.