OHDSI Collaboration Generates COVID-Related Studies For Observational International Data Network

Check Here For COVID-19 Updates From The OHDSI Network

MedRxiv Preprints: Hydroxychloroquine Study • Multi-Institution Characterization Study • Personalized Risk Calculator Study

A four-day global collaboration within the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community designed and began executing studies on an international set of observational health databases (including insurance claims and electronic health records) to aid decision-making during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

One study is the first large-scale characterization of COVID-19 patients in both the United States and Asia; six databases with COVID-19 patients located in both the U.S. and South Korea already started running data on this project, and other databases are being sought to collaborate in this network study.

The largest study ever conducted on the safety of hydroxychloroquine was designed and executed across an international set of databases. This study of more than 130,000 patients from the USA, England, Germany and South Korea focuses on the overall safety profile of hydroxychloroquine, a drug currently being evaluated as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

The third study designed the first prediction model externally validated on COVID-19 patients to support triage decisions in an effort to ‘flatten the curve’. This model, which determines which patients presenting with symptoms are most likely to require hospitalization, was developed against US data and then tested on South Korean data.

More than 330 people from 30 nations registered to collaborate in this 88-hour virtual study-a-thon, which concluded March 29 with a global presentation from multiple study leads to announce both designs and preliminary findings. Results are currently being evaluated and papers are actively being submitted to journals for peer review.

“It was a humbling effort to lead the OHDSI community in making a meaningful impact during this COVID-19 crisis,” said Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, MD, MSc, PhD, Professor of Pharmaco- and Device Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. “Prioritized questions from governments, health care agencies, and institutions helped direct our efforts, and it was inspiring to see how our community rallied together to make important progress on this research effort.”

Other study designs were presented during the final global update, including safety profiles of other drugs potentially used to treat COVID-19.

OHDSI is a multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary collaborative to bring out the value of health data through large-scale analytics. All solutions are open-source. OHDSI has established an international network of researchers and observational health databases with a central coordinating center housed at Columbia University.

“I am extremely proud to see what our community accomplished, but we are well aware that this is merely the beginning stage of a long research agenda,” said George Hripcsak, MD, MS, the Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor and Chair of the Columbia Department of Biomedical Informatics. “Our international network is committed to continuing work in this area until this pandemic has ended.”

All updates on OHDSI efforts on COVID-19 will be posted here and within its community forums, and shared on both its Twitter and LinkedIn feeds.