The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (OMOP CDM) is an international shared data model that enables system-wide health analytics and research. Learn about the model, its benefits, use cases and ARDC-supported national initiatives to implement it in Australia.
By the end of reading this resource, you should understand the following about the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (OMOP CDM):
Australia’s healthcare data holds untapped potential. Hospital and administrative health care records contain useful information on medical conditions, diagnostic tests, treatments, outcomes and patient demographics. This data can help reveal disease patterns, assess treatment effectiveness, and inform clinical guidelines to improve patient care. However, differences in how healthcare data are collected, recorded and stored across Australia make it difficult to compare and analyse.
The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (OMOP CDM) is the international gold standard for standardising health data into a consistent format. Developed by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) initiative, the OMOP CDM enables data from different healthcare sites or jurisdictions to be more easily analysed and compared, without compromising security or patient confidentiality.
The OMOP CDM is:
The OMOP CDM transforms disparate data into a common format by using standard vocabularies, terminologies and coding schemes. The model can be implemented and used within existing database infrastructure, without the data ever leaving its host institution. Once in a common format, the database can be used to generate rigorous and reproducible evidence using standardised analytics tools.
Most medications rely on randomised clinical trials to test their safety and efficacy before they are approved for broader public use. However, clinical trials are often conducted on a small scale, making it difficult to detect rare and severe side effects that may only be visible at the population level. The OMOP CDM standardises health data so researchers can compare datasets from around Australia and the world to use in large-scale studies, helping identify rare adverse effects and draw more robust conclusions. Researchers have already used the OMOP CDM to help investigate the safety and effectiveness of medicines for heart failure, cardiovascular disease and asthma. The tool will also help the healthcare system respond more rapidly to major health threats such as future pandemics.
When COVID-19 emerged in 2020, Australia’s healthcare data was not harmonised, unlike some other countries such as South Korea. This made it difficult to get an accurate picture of how the virus was spreading across the country and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines, especially in vulnerable people. Once the Australian Health Data Evidence Network (AHDEN) initiative is implemented, we will be able to identify and respond to future pandemics and major health threats much faster.
Professor Nicole Pratt, Adelaide University
The OMOP CDM will be deployed across Australian hospitals by the Australian Health Data Evidence Network (AHDEN), part of the ARDC’s People Research Data Commons, through a 3-year national initiative. AHDEN is led by Professor Nicole Pratt (project lead), Adelaide University, and President of OHDSI Australia. It’s a national partnership between ARDC, Adelaide University and The University of Queensland, with more partners to be announced soon.
In another project, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is partnering with the ARDC to standardise Australia’s Admitted Patient Care (APC) hospital data to a common language for both government agencies and external researchers by converting it to the OMOP CDM. This conversion will establish an interoperable national digital health asset that removes technical bottlenecks for researchers and analysts, speeds up medical breakthroughs, and enables Australian participation in worldwide health studies.
A pilot project within this initiative, a partnership between the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and ARDC, will implement the OMOP CDM and analytic tools within the ABS secure research environment to demonstrate the feasibility of consistent large-scale observational health research and alignment with international standards.
FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) and OMOP are complementary standards that can leverage each other. FHIR is optimised for the real-time transmission of patient-level data in clinical settings in a lossless exchange. However, in order to generate rapid and scalable population-level analytics, an additional complementary standard (such as the OMOP CDM) is required to impose guardrails around how to make valid comparisons and formulate questions across different data sources. Harnessing FHIR-powered patient-level data and its interoperable exchange into OMOP-powered population analytics is the logical next step to extract intelligence and rapidly turn patient-level data across populations into insights.
Learn how your organisation can implement the OMOP CDM. Visit the AHDEN project page.
To keep up to date on ARDC’s work in this space:
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