The DARWIN EU®  Coordination Centre (CC) is developing libraries that store re-usable study artefacts such as concept sets or phenotype definitions. We need to make these artefacts Findable Accessible Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR).

At the moment the CC is working on a library of OMOP-based phenotypes that can be reused (with or without modifications) to conduct studies in the DARWIN EU® network:

The DARWIN EU® Cohort Knowledge base (DECK)

Solid and well defined algorithms are necessary to identify people with a set of characteristics (e.g. coded diagnoses or recorded prescription/s or dispensation/s of a specific medicine) and logic (e.g. first diagnosis of a specific condition, or initiation of a specific therapy) that make them part of a cohort.

The use of the OMOP CDM enables the generation, review, and approval of transportable cohort definitions across a network of previously mapped data sources. The DARWIN EU® Cohort Knowledge base (DECK for short) will compile transportable algorithms that can be used to identify cohorts necessary for the conducting of EMA-commissioned studies, including users of specific medicinal products for drug utilisation studies, people with specific conditions for the study of descriptive epidemiology, or people newly diagnosed with a specific health outcome for the study of drug safety.

DECK will leverage existing knowledge compiled by the OHDSI community, previous EHDEN studies, and other previous studies, including EMA-commissioned tenders. The existing preliminary version of DECK collates a large number of clinical definitions that have been previously produced and using during previous studies.

Where possible and/or necessary, DARWIN EU® studies will leverage validated algorithms from DECK. The cumulative knowledge generated using the DECK will not only accelerate the studies conducted during Years 3-5, but also maximise the reproducibility of our research by re-using the exact same or documented variations of algorithms for the same events over time.