New data partners join cross-border effort to standardise data to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model

Health Data Research UK and the UK Health Data Research Alliance are pleased to be awarding five UK applicants to join the EHDEN consortium and map their data sources to the Observational Medical Outcome Partnership (OMOP) common data model: 

• Discover-NOW, the Health Data Research Hub for Real World Evidence   
• Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• CVD-COVID-UK, BHF Data Science Centre (operated by HDR UK) 
• National Joint registry (HQIP), the largest orthopaedic registry in the world
• Genomics England

The EHDEN consortium is led by the Erasmus University Medical Centre in The Netherland, and 12 pharmaceutical partners. EHDEN’s mission is to accelerate research through insights generated from use of real-world health data. To do so, it aims to create a network of partners across Europe who collaborate on research methodologies, tools and standards to enable federated data analytics.  

By working with EHDEN to award these new data partners, the Alliance and HDR UK not only will drive OMOP data mapping across organisations, as recommended in the Principles for Data Standards white paper, but will also increase collaboration between European and UK organisations as well as contributing to the movement towards a federation of standardised analytics to support rapid network studies in both UK and Europe.   

These new UK data partners will join current EHDEN data partners in their effort to drive standardisation by mapping their data sources to the OMOP common data model possibly engaging with one the EHDEN certified SMEs. Together, they represent over 830 million patient records, originating from various care settings across Europe.  

For this call, we received 158 applications, the highest number to date. All applications were reviewed and selected by an independent Data Source Prioritisation Committee (DSPC), and due to the high number of high-quality proposals, only a small number could be funded. 

Prof Dani Prieto-Alhambra, EHDEN’s Research Coordinator, Professor of Pharmaco- and Device Epidemiology, NDORMS, University of Oxford, and Professor, Real World Evidence, Erasmus Medical Center, the Netherlands, says:  

“Thank you to all our applicants across 30 countries, and it’s always bittersweet that we cannot select all applicants, with a limited budget. It has also been a very positive experience collaborating with HDR UK in our last call with UK applicants.  

“There are now 22 UK data partners in the EHDEN community, and we look forward to collaborating with members of the UK Health Data Research Alliance to strengthen our network and encourage adoption of standards for better use of health data.” 

Transforming datasets to a common data model is in fact a vital step for federated analytics and for achieving our common goal to unite data assets and make them usable to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives. 

HDR UK will now be initiating the process of onboarding the new data partners while in parallel a work plan will be worked out and linkage to one of the EHDEN-certified SMEs will be initiated. We anticipate that the first mappings will start in spring. 

To find out more about the EHDEN network, what’s next for these data partners and a list of data partners by country, see the EHDEN announcement.