OHDSI Canada Symposium 2026 AGENDA

Day 1 participants arrive at the Vector Institute for registration.

Alison Park and Dr. Alexander Davydov facilitate this session, which draws 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.

Join us for a hands-on study-a-thon—led by Dr. Evan Minty and co-facilitated by Dr. Jenna Reps, Dr. Jamie Gilbert, Dr. Danielle Boyce, Darya Zhukova and Dr. Lisa Lix—that will guide participants through the lifecycle of an observational study using the OMOP CDM and OHDSI tools. Using case definitions from the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System (CCDSS), participants will develop, evaluate, and compare different chronic disease phenotypes, assess study cohorts, and conduct a federated analysis using OHDSI tools. The session will also introduce approaches for using large language models (LLMs) to support phenotype development and evaluation.

Boxed lunch will be provided.

Dr. Anne Martel leads this session, in which participants 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.

The Study-A-Thon continues with Dr. Evan Minty, Dr. Jenna Reps, Dr. Jamie Gilbert, Dr. Danielle Boyce, Darya Zhukova and Dr. Lisa Lix.

Participants arrive at University Health Network BMO Education & Conference Centre for registration. Coffee and tea will be served.

Dr. Lisa Lix and Dr. Evan Minty welcome participants to the University Health Network BMO Education & Conference Centre and provide brief opening remarks.

Elder Dr. Wendy Phillips offers a traditional First Nations welcome and help open OHDSI Canada Symposium 2026 in a good way.

Dr. Paul Nagy gives the OHDSI Canada Symposium 2026 keynote, which explores how uniting OHDSI’s standardized data network with precision medicine insights can empower health care organizations to turn real-world evidence into actionable care. Drawing on his extensive experience, Dr. Nagy discusses how health organizations can become Learning Health Systems by leveraging OHDSI to help clinicians and data scientists make discoveries to elevate patient outcomes.

Featured Guest Speaker Dr. Jenna Reps offers an accessible tour of OHDSI’s characterization and prediction tools and the OMOP Common Data Model. She’ll show how standardized health data can be used to predict risks and outcomes, highlighting why this approach works, presenting real examples, and giving clear best-practice advice for researchers and clinicians.

Dr. Christine Hallinan, Dr. Lillian Sung and Dr. Danielle Boyce share their experiences with current research using OMOP as well as the progress being made to support multi-institutional observational research.

Buffet lunch will be served.

How can medical imaging data can be incorporated into OMOP to support multimodal observational research? The session will begin with Dr. Paul Nagy introducing the Medical Imaging OMOP Extension and the integration of DICOM metadata and imaging-derived features into OMOP. This will be followed by the Canadian implementation perspective, with Dr. Anne Martel, Dr. Philippe Després, and Dr. James White sharing their approaches, implementation considerations, and the research opportunities they aim to enable.

Members from OHDSI Canada along with international collaborators, including Brad Millson (IQVIA) and Kayley Marchena (GEMINI),  discuss research underway using OMOP and the progress being made to support multi-institutional observational research.

This panel explores the governance, privacy, security and ethical challenges of conducting multi-institutional and federated health data research in Canada, with a focus on OMOP-based research and network studies. Drawing on their experience with Canadian health data platforms and research networks, Dr. Felipe Pérez-Jvostov, Dr. Jennifer Brooks and Josip Maras will discuss key considerations, including data custodianship and governance, data sharing, institutional research ethics board (REB/IRB) requirements, and privacy and security safeguards. Moderated by Mahmoud Azimaee, the discussion will examine how these challenges affect institutions implementing and using OMOP databases for multi-institutional research, and identify opportunities for OHDSI Canada to advance shared approaches, practical guidance and solutions that support secure, ethical and effective collaboration.

Dr. Lisa Lix and Dr. Evan Minty provide reflections from two days of learning, sharing and collaborating.

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