OHDSI Canada Symposium 2026 AGENDA

Drawing on the real-world experience of Canadian teams engaged in mapping Canadian drug terminologies, participants will explore considerations when mapping to OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies, including the consequences and trade-offs of mapping at different levels of detail (e.g., drug brand level vs. ingredient level) and the potential impact on interoperability and down-steam analyses, emerging approaches such as LLM-assisted mapping, as well as opportunities for collaboration across OHDSI Canada organizations and community contributions to the OHDSI Vocabulary.

Learn how to conduct an observational study using the OMOP CDM and OHDSI tools, working through the research process from start to finish. Participants will work with a real-world incidence rate use case based on a Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System (CCDSS) definition.

Learn how to conduct an observational study using the OMOP CDM and OHDSI tools, working through the research process from start to finish. Participants will work with a real-world incidence rate use case based on a Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System (CCDSS) definition.

Preparatory work before the event will introduce the research question, study design, and preliminary phenotype. During the Study-a-thon, participants will evaluate and refine the phenotype, develop and assess the study cohort, and use ATLAS and other OHDSI tools to conduct the analysis. The session will also introduce approaches for using LLMs to support phenotype and cohort development and verification. Participants will conclude by interpreting the results and discussing the practical considerations involved in generating reliable, reproducible evidence using OMOP.

Explore practical approaches to developing and maintaining OMOP ETL pipelines, drawing on real-world experience transforming Sunnybrook clinical data. Participants will work through key implementation challenges, including incomplete mappings, maintaining links to source data dictionaries, managing evolving vocabularies, and establishing sustainable processes for improving mappings over time.

Session continued.

By uniting OHDSI’s standardized data network with precision medicine insights, healthcare organizations can empower Learning Health Systems that turn real-world evidence into actionable care. This keynote explores how health organizations can leverage OHDSI to help clinicians and data scientists make discoveries to elevate patient outcomes.

Hear from OHDSI Canada and international collaborators about research underway using OMOP and the progress being made to support multi-institutional observational research.

Explore how medical imaging data can be incorporated into OMOP to support multimodal observational research. The session will begin with an introduction to the Medical Imaging OMOP Extension and integration of DICOM metadata and imaging-derived features into OMOP.

Canadian teams will then share their experiences and approaches to incorporating imaging data into their own OMOP instances, highlighting implementation considerations, challenges, and opportunities for future research.

Hear from OHDSI Canada and international collaborators about research underway using OMOP and the progress being made to support multi-institutional observational research.

This panel will explore the governance, privacy, security and ethics challenges involved in conducting multi-institutional and federated health data research in Canada, with a focus on the implications for OMOP-based research and network studies. Drawing on experience from Canadian health data platforms and other research networks, panelists will discuss issues such as data custodianship/governance, data sharing, IRB/REB requirements, security and privacy considerations. The discussion will consider how these challenges apply to institutions implementing and using OMOP databases for multi-institutional research, and explore opportunities for OHDSI Canada to develop common approaches, guidance and practical solutions.

Mix and mingle with speakers, attendees and organizers while perusing the poster presentations and enjoying light refreshments.