Healthcare data has become increasingly digitized in recent years, raising hopes for new and better uses of real-world data beyond the management of care – most notably, for clinical research. Too often though, electronic health record (EHR) data is inaccessible to research teams or is poorly aligned with the industry standard Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM).
InterSystems® OMOP™ offers a light-weight, cloud-based data pipeline and management solution combining the standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) of EHRs with InterSystems out-of the-box transformation to the CDM and a Software as a Service OMOP repository. With this data, you can also take advantage of the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community and tools to further enhance your research agenda.
Picture a seamless process where real world data extraction, transformation, and loading from diverse EHRs into a managed OMOP repository becomes a catalyst for innovation and collaboration with your research partners.
Transform FHIR data from EHRs into OMOP-ready data
for real-world research
for real-world research
Introducing InterSystems OMOP
Built on InterSystems IRIS for Health™, a complete cloud-first data platform that makes it easier to build and deploy high-performance, AI-enabled applications that connect data and application silos.
InterSystems OMOP supports large-scale clinical research and patient data management with:
- Efficient, Scalable Access to Daily EHR Data: InterSystems OMOP uses the standard Bulk FHIR capabilities of your EHR(s) to update your OMOP repository with newly eligible patient records.
- Rapid Deployment For OHDSI Environments: Spin up an OMOP repository and leverage the OHDSI tools, all built on InterSystems IRIS for Health, delivered in the cloud.
- Timely Data for Trial Recruitment: Frequent data updates allow clinicians and researchers to identify and recruit potential trial participants more rapidly. Reaching out to candidates immediately after care may increase their willingness to participate.
- Out-of-the-Box EHR to Research Transformation: The no-code data pipeline provides standard mappings from FHIR to the OMOP CDM to transform EHR data into research-grade information and lower your ETL maintenance costs.
- Continuous Data Quality Monitoring: Data quality dashboards and summary metrics ensure that problems with data quality can be identified and corrected at the source in a timely manner.
Key Features
- Automatically converts and refresh EHR data into OMOP daily, without the need for complex ETL development.
- Utilize the widely adopted Bulk FHIR standard by EHR vendors.
- Quickly deploy a OHDSI environment with capacity based subscription pricing
- Ensure security and regulatory compliance by leveraging cloud vendor best practices.
- Utilize a data quality dashboard before data transformation to detect and monitor data quality.
- Enable incremental data refresh for only those patients with new data.
- Out-of-the-box availability of common terminology mapping to OMOP ontology with support for local terminology mapping.
- Local terminology mapping can be used for transformation.
- Common FHIR resources are mapped to OMOP CDM 5.4 out of the box.
- Integrate InterSystems IRIS as a new OMOP database option for OHDSI tools as well as sending data to existing OMOP repository.
- Option to support advanced patient privacy protection.
Refresh, monitor, and manage research data
in a cloud-based OMOP environment
Out of the Box Data Mapping
FHIR is an evolving standard. Today, InterSystems OMOP delivers out of the box mappings from standard FHIR resources to OMOP CDM tables as shown in the table below. The mapping is compliant with OHDSI FHIR to OMOP Implementation Guide.
| FHIR Resource | OMOP Table |
| Patient | Person, Location, Death |
| Encounter | Visit_occurence |
| Condition, AllergyIntolerance | Condition_occurence, Measurement, Observation, Procedure_occurence |
| Observation | Observation, Measurement, Condition_occurence, Procedure_occurence, Death |
| Location, Organization | Care_site |
| Practitioner | Provider, Location |
| Procedure | Procedure_occurence, Condition_occurence, Measurement, Observation |
| MedicationAdministration, MedicationRequest, Immunization | Drug_exposure |
Deployed as a Cloud Solution
InterSystems OMOP Platform is a Software-as-a-Service offering delivered and managed by InterSystems. Customers of the service can create multiple deployments that are sized, managed, and accessed independently.
Services Include:
- Inclusive platform with all necessary infrastructure resources and software for seamless operation
- Onboarding provided by managed services team to manage new deployments
- Access to the InterSystems Cloud Portal, in which customers can manage, and monitor their OMOP Platform deployments
- Access to and full use of the latest versions of client libraries
- Available on major hyperscaler platforms
- Robust security and data protection programs
- 24/7 support, including real-time monitoring
Frequently Asked Questions
about OMOP & InterSystems
What is OMOP?
OMOP (Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership) is an open-source common data model (CDM) designed to standardize the format and content of observational data for large-scale analytics and clinical research. It enables researchers to analyze diverse data sources in a consistent manner, improving the ability to conduct reproducible studies and generate real-world evidence. By mapping healthcare data into the OMOP CDM, institutions can streamline data sharing, accelerate research, and enable cross-institutional studies while ensuring data interoperability and consistency across different healthcare systems and sources.
What is unique about research data?
Research data, especially in healthcare, is highly diverse and complex. It comes from multiple sources such as electronic health records, lab systems, and medical devices, each using different formats and standards. Additionally, research data must be standardized to ensure it is comparable and usable across institutions, which can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. The sensitive nature of healthcare data also requires strict privacy and compliance measures, adding another layer of complexity to its handling. These challenges demand solutions that automate data extraction, transformation, and standardization to ensure interoperability and scalability
What is InterSystems OMOP?
InterSystems OMOP is a comprehensive all in one research data pipeline and repository solution that automates data extract, transformation, and load (ETL) into target OMOP CDM repository to support large scale clinical research with superior interoperability and scalability.
Built on InterSystems IRIS® data platform, the solution offers out of the box FHIR to OMOP mapping, terminology mapping, patient level transformation for daily refresh, data quality monitoring, error reporting, and cloud native deployment.
Built on InterSystems IRIS® data platform, the solution offers out of the box FHIR to OMOP mapping, terminology mapping, patient level transformation for daily refresh, data quality monitoring, error reporting, and cloud native deployment.
Why is data quality monitoring crucial in healthcare research data management?
Accurate data is crucial in healthcare research, as even small errors can distort results, compromise patient safety, and lead to ineffective treatments. Reliable data ensures that research findings are actionable and trustworthy, driving better clinical decisions and medical advancements.
The InterSystems OMOP solution continuously evaluates FHIR data quality within the OMOP model, identifying gaps like unrecognized terminology or codes. Missing data triggers an error, while sub-optimal data generates a warning. Automated reports monitor bulk FHIR data during regular refreshes, enabling researchers to easily address data quality issues.
The InterSystems OMOP solution continuously evaluates FHIR data quality within the OMOP model, identifying gaps like unrecognized terminology or codes. Missing data triggers an error, while sub-optimal data generates a warning. Automated reports monitor bulk FHIR data during regular refreshes, enabling researchers to easily address data quality issues.
How does InterSystems OMOP enhance interoperability for healthcare research?
InterSystems OMOP supports interoperability by integrating FHIR and OMOP standards to facilitate the secondary use of clinical data. FHIR is becoming the standard for clinical data sharing, and its adoption is increasing across health systems and research institutions. InterSystems OMOP streamlines the mapping of FHIR data to the OMOP common data model, which is essential for developing high-quality real-world evidence and advancing clinical research. Users can also specify external OMOP repository connection parameters within InterSystems OMOP, enabling data to flow directly into an existing OMOP repository, further supporting seamless integration across systems.
Why is InterSystems OMOP well-suited for regional and national research collaborations?
InterSystems OMOP is ideal for regional and national research collaborations due to its ability to address key challenges like ETL and data quality while supporting FHIR-based interoperability. As regional and national efforts, such as CMS interoperability rules in the US and European initiatives like EHDS and DARWIN, adopt FHIR standards, the demand for efficient OMOP integration grows. InterSystems OMOP provides a cloud-native solution that accelerates data sharing and collaboration, meeting emerging standards and reducing barriers to entry for large-scale research efforts. It also offers user options to add standard OMOP vocabularies or local terminology mapping files, supporting regional and local needs in collaborative research settings.
What benefits would InterSystems OMOP provide?
Research institutions can increase revenue from research activities as researchers can spend less time on building data repositories and establishing data access from EHR systems. Researchers and data scientists can access high-quality data to build analytics and develop AI models, while the organization no longer needs to maintain custom ETL scripts. Clinicians and researchers can also take advantage of daily refresh capabilities to support new use cases on OMOP such as trial recruitment and clinical quality monitoring, especially across different institutions. While the OMOP data model does not store most protected health information (PHI), InterSystems OMOP allows users to suppress additional data elements—such as patient address, provider identifier, or facility information—to further support patient privacy protection in these use cases.
How can we get started?
The first step is to find the right partner.
InterSystems has been a leader in digital health since its inception. We understand the complexity of healthcare data and the importance of seamless data exchange across various systems and platforms. Our expertise in health data interoperability ensures that organizations can easily integrate and access the right data, improving care coordination and operational efficiency. By partnering with InterSystems, organizations benefit from a trusted solution provider, as well as dedicated reliable and efficient health IT solutions.
InterSystems has been a leader in digital health since its inception. We understand the complexity of healthcare data and the importance of seamless data exchange across various systems and platforms. Our expertise in health data interoperability ensures that organizations can easily integrate and access the right data, improving care coordination and operational efficiency. By partnering with InterSystems, organizations benefit from a trusted solution provider, as well as dedicated reliable and efficient health IT solutions.