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FHIR or OMOP?

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If there's one question we are getting from prospective customers often it is "If we already decided on/invested in FHIR, why should we use OMOP?"

To answer that question let's look at what each of those mean:

Because both are referred to as "standards for clinical data", one might think they are competing standards. But in fact, this is not the case at all.

A good analogy is the telephone.

Whenever two people talk on the phone, they have all the required connectivity from the devices to the wires, radio transmitters and receivers, routers, switchboards and everything else even ears and mouths. This is analogous to FHIR.

In order to have a conversation they also need to have a common language, complete with a dictionary, grammar rules, phonetics, semantics and semiotics. This is the analog of OMOP.

Piano supports both FHIR and OMOP. In the screenshot below you can see how Piano uses an automated workflow to receive data using FHIR, anonymise patients before storage, transform the data into OMOP and finally store the transformed data for use in research projects.

The good news is that implementing an OMOP-based research capability is much easier than creating seamless interoperability with FHIR. Piano makes it faster and inexpensive to create such a capability in weeks rather than months or years.

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