The Role of the CDM

No single observational data source provides a comprehensive view of the clinical data a patient accumulates while receiving healthcare, and therefore none can be sufficient to meet all expected outcome analysis needs. This explains the need for assessing and analyzing multiple data sources concurrently using a common data standard. This standard is provided by the OMOP Common Data Model (CDM).

The CDM is designed to support the conduct of research to identify and evaluate associations between interventions (drug exposure, procedures, healthcare policy changes etc.) and outcomes caused by these interventions (condition occurrences, procedures, drug exposure etc.). Outcomes can be efficacious (benefit) or adverse (safety risk). Often times, specific patient cohorts (e.g., those taking a certain drug or suffering from a certain disease) may be defined for treatments or outcomes, using clinical events (diagnoses, observations, procedures, etc.) that occur in predefined temporal relationships to each other. The CDM, combined with its standardized content (via the Standardized Vocabularies), will ensure that research methods can be systematically applied to produce meaningfully comparable and reproducible results.