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OMOP Cup

Ensuring the safety of prescription drugs has emerged as a major global public health challenge. Several recent events have highlighted the need for new data sources and new algorithms to respond to the challenge. The new data sources have now become available but algorithmic progress has lagged. Here is your chance to develop a groundbreaking approach that can help protect the lives of millions of patients worldwide.

The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (http://omop.fnih.org) is a public-private partnership designed to help improve the monitoring of drugs for safety. The partnership began in late 2008 and is conducting a two-year research initiative to determine the contribution and utility of using existing healthcare databases to identify and evaluate safety issues of drugs already on the market.

We are providing a large dataset that resembles observational data that can be extracted from insurance claims or electronic medical records. Your method will identify relationships in the data between drugs and medical outcomes (adverse events). The goal is to develop methods that correctly identify true drug-event associations while minimizing false positive findings. Methods will be evaluated by how closely they predict the known relationships that exist in the data.

The OMOP Cup has two related challenges. Challenge 1 explores how well your method works when provided an entire dataset, so the goal is accurate classification of which drugs are associated with which outcomes. Challenge 2 evaluates the timeliness of detection of drug-event associations by having your methods run against data sequentially as it accumulates over time.

Each challenge offers a Progress Prize at the end of November, and a Grand Prize to be awarded in March 2010. Total prize money is $20,000! All you have to do to win is come up with a high-performing method, and then share your method and describe what you�ve done with OMOP and the broader research community. We can all learn from your great ideas!