In February and March this year, the ARDC and partners hosted a series of events across Canberra, Sydney and online to advance the coordination of the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) in Australia.
The OMOP CDM is an international gold standard that allows health systems to analyse and compare data in a secure and consistent way.
While modern businesses use data daily to refine every service, healthcare data remains complex. Most Australian clinical records are designed for individual patient care, not for system-wide analysis. These “messy” and sensitive systems make it difficult and costly for researchers to answer big questions about the safety, quality and innovation of healthcare.
OMOP addresses this by providing a ‘universal lingua franca’ for health data. It standardises information for research while ensuring private patient records stay securely within the clinic. Researchers instead work with a de-identified, high-quality dataset optimised for policy and science.
The OMOP CDM is being implemented nationally through the ARDC’s People Research Data Commons. Applying it in Australia will help researchers collaborate on global studies, benchmark health outcomes against other countries, and generate trustworthy evidence to guide healthcare policy.
The recent sessions focused on how standardised data and analytics can support a nationally coordinated Learning Health System.
Central to the event series was the visit of Assistant Professor Patrick Ryan, Vice President of Observational Health Data Analytics at Johnson & Johnson and co-founder of the global Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) initiative, whose travel to Australia was hosted by the ARDC.
This article provides an overview of the recent events to support the national adoption of OMOP for Australian health research.
25 February 2026 | Canberra and Online
Hosted by Rosie Hicks (CEO, ARDC), Professor Keith McNeil (South Australia Health), and Professor Nicole Pratt (Adelaide University), this roundtable brought together 35 representatives from Commonwealth and state health departments, national research infrastructure and academia.
With insights from A/Prof Patrick Ryan and Professor Seng Chan You (Yonsei University, South Korea), participants discussed the value of adopting the OMOP CDM to transform fragmented health data into actionable intelligence.
Key themes included:
For a more in-depth summary of the discussion, read the summary of the roundtable.
25–27 February 2026 | Canberra and Online
The People Research Data Commons is implementing the OMOP CDM nationally through the Australian Health Data Evidence Network (AHDEN) and projects with Commonwealth government agency partners in the Government Health Data Asset Program.
To support project implementation, approximately 40 attendees from AHDEN and government partners participated in a 2-day technical workshop. This was followed by an online Clinical Use Case Workshop attended by 85 participants, including many clinician researchers – doctors who both provide healthcare and who are also looking to the OMOP data, tools and methodologies to help analyse and improve healthcare.
Ezra Fass, from the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, noted the value of the practical demonstrations led by A/Prof Patrick Ryan using the OHDSI ‘ATLAS’ tool:
“Participating in an on-the-fly tutorial and exploration with our real-world use case was… extremely eye-opening about the possibilities of OMOP for reliable and replicable evidence generation. Working through the parameters of our clinical use case and translating those into workflow steps within ATLAS really highlighted the intuitive nature of how the application can be used.”
Watch the keynote lecture from day one of the workshop with A/Prof Patrick Ryan.
Recordings of Day 2 and the Clinical Use Case Workshop will be available shortly. To receive the recordings when they’re available, register your interest.
March 2026 | Sydney
A highlight of A/Prof Patrick Ryan’s visit to Australia was a meeting in Sydney with Grahame Grieve, the founder of the HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard.
FHIR is the global interoperability standard in real-time data exchange for healthcare delivery, and OMOP is an international data standard for large-scale health analytics and evidence generation. The discussion focused on how these 2 frameworks can work in tandem to create a seamless pipeline – leveraging ‘FHIR-powered’ clinical data exchange for ‘OMOP-powered’ research insights.
This collaboration continued at the HL7 Australia Workgroup meeting on 10 March, where leaders from AHDEN, OHDSI Australia, HL7 Australia and the Sparked community discussed technical pathways for interoperable data exchange within the Australian ecosystem.
For more information on these initiatives, please contact Dr Ilan Mears via [email protected].
Learn more about the Australian Health Data Evidence Network (AHDEN)
The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.
