Health Level Seven International (HL7®) and the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) network today announced a collaboration to address the sharing and tracking of data in the healthcare and research industries by creating a single common data model. The organizations will integrate HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) and OHDSI’s Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model to achieve this goal.
HL7 International CEO Dr. Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D., underscored the significance of this partnership. “The Covid-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to share global health and research data.” He continued, “Collaboration with OHDSI is critical to solving this challenge and will help our mutual vision of a world in which everyone can securely access and use the right data when and where they need it.”
The organizations will align their standards to capture data in a clearly defined way into a single common data model. This will allow clinicians as well as researchers to pull data from multiple sources and compile it in the same structure without degradation of the information. This endeavor has global implications with the potential to permit the clinical community to define the elements they need, package and share them in a consistent single structure.
“We are excited to have the OHDSI community join this partnership with HL7 to evolve community standards around observational research and clinical care,” said George Hripcsak, MD, MS, Chair and Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia, the coordinating center for OHDSI. “These standards set the foundation for our mission of global, open-science research, and this partnership will accelerate the development of effective and safe treatments for diseases facing today’s global population.”
About Health Level Seven International (HL7)
Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven International is the global authority for healthcare information interoperability and standards with affiliates established in more than 30 countries. HL7 is a non-profit, ANSI accredited standards development organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. HL7’s members represent approximately 500 corporate members, which include more than 90 percent of the information systems vendors serving healthcare. HL7 collaborates with other standards developers and provider, payer, philanthropic and government agencies at the highest levels to ensure the development of comprehensive and reliable standards and successful interoperability efforts.
For more information, please visit: www.HL7.org.
About OHDSI
Founded in 2014, the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) initiative grew out of the successful Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP). OHDSI is a multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary, open-science collaborative to bring out the value of health data through large-scale analytics. With hundreds of researchers from 30 countries and health records for about 600 million unique patients from around the world, OHDSI seeks to improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care. OHDSI’s data network is based on its OMOP common data model, enabling federated analytics amongst collaborators.
For more information, visit www.ohdsi.org.
