Adoption of the OMOP Common Data Model
The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) is a standardized healthcare data model developed by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community. It's designed to facilitate the analysis of healthcare data from multiple sources, including Electronic Health Records (EHRs), claims data, and other real-world data sources, to enable the efficient analysis of data to produce reliable and comparable evidence about treatments, interventions, and outcomes.
The OMOP CDM addresses the challenges of diverse and disparate healthcare databases, by standardising health data into a common format, promoting analysis across different databases, organisations and even countries. Its standardised codes and vocabularies enhance reproducibility, facilitate collaboration, and enable the analysis of large-scale data sets.
By leveraging the OMOP framework, researchers can compare medical interventions’ effectiveness, track patient outcomes over time, identify medication safety concerns, and contribute to evidence-based healthcare decision-making.
The Alliance is working in partnership with other organisations to support adoption of the OMOP common data model in the UK through several activities, which include:
- Partnership with NHS England: the Data for R&D Programme’s NHS Research Secure Data Environment Network has agreed to adopt OMOP as a common data model. The Alliance is collaborating with NHS England to facilitate the adoption of the OMOP common data model across the SDEs.
- OMOP Survey: The Alliance is conducting a survey of data custodians, data users, and researchers to understand the level of adoption of OMOP and other standards in the UK. The survey results provide insights into data transformation progress, barriers, and ways to support OMOP adoption. Preliminary results of the survey can be found here.
- OMOP Special Interest Group (SIG): The Alliance convenes an OMOP special interest group, which meets quarterly. The aim of this group is to avoid duplication and foster collaboration through sharing knowledge, experiences, and tools for data transformation to the OMOP common data. Outputs from the inaugural meeting can be found here. The next OMOP SIG will take place on 8th of November 2023. If you are interested in joining the Special Interest Group for OMOP, please email ukalliance@hdruk.ac.ukto express an interest.
- Supporting data Transformation: The Alliance is supporting data custodians in transforming their data sets to OMOP. Through collaboration with the EHDEN consortium, five new UK data partners have joined the initiative with our support.
Adoption of the OMOP CDM will contribute to more robust and evidence-based healthcare research and decision-making. An emphasis on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and addressing barriers is essential to ensure successful implementation across diverse healthcare settings.