#OHDSI Geographic Informations Systems (GIS) Workgroup Homepage

Mission

The OHDSI GIS workgroup aims to introduce new infrastructure, tooling, and CDM extension tables that will allow researchers to seamlessly incorporate place-based datasets into their OMOP-shaped databases to enhance their evidence-generating workflows.

Meeting Schedule

The OHDSI GIS Workgroup meets weekly on Fridays at 10 AM ET (Meeting Link)

We also meet out-of-band with collaborators at “use case” meetings. If you have specific goals for generating evidence using place-based data in conjunction with OMOP data, we’d love to work with you. Please see our page on proposing new use cases.

Problem Space

Geospatial data come in a variety of source formats with no universal, interoperable standard representation. While working with a single geospatial dataset has presents some technical challenges, the complexity of using geospatial begins to compound when variables from disparate datasets are needed for a single analysis study. As ad-hoc solutions are introduced to deal with the increasing technical complexity, the reproducibility of these studies plummets.

In order to enable reproducible studies that incorporate place-related data with longitudinal patient-level data, it is first necessary to develop functionality to automate retrieval and transformation of publicly available place-related data into a standard representation.

Goals

The overarching goal of the OHDSI GIS Workgroup is to develop software and standards for incorporating place-based data into the OMOP CDM and present this back to the OHDSI community. We reach these goals through development in the four key areas below.

1) Infrastructure

  • Functional Metadata Catalog
  • Harmonized geospatial data model

2) Functionality

  • Geocoding
  • Accessing geospatial datasets

3) Vocabulary

  • GIS specific concepts
  • SDoH vocabulary
  • Toxin vocabulary

4) Extensions

  • Exposure_occurrence


Roadmap

Under Construction


Publications/Presentation

OHDSI GIS Infrastructure (2023 OHDSI Symposium Poster, Abstract)

Toxins Vocabulary (2023 OHDSI Symposium Poster, Abstract)

OHDSI GIS Workgroup October 10, 2023 Update (video)

OHDSI GIS Workgroup 2023 Objectives and Key Results (video, slides)

OHDSI GIS Workgroup August 23, 2022 Update (video)