Feasibility of Mapping Austrian Health Claims Data to the OMOP Common Data Model

The Main Association of Austrian Social Security Institutions collects pseudonymized claims data from Austrian social security institutions and information about hospital stays in a database for research purposes. For new studies the same data are repeatedly reprocessed and it is difficult to compare different study results even though the data is already preprocessed and prepared in a proprietary data model. Based on a study on adverse drug events in relation to inappropriate medication in geriatric patients the suitability of the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model (CDM) is analyzed and data is transformed into the OMOP CDM. 1,023 (99.7%) of drug codes and 3,812 (99.2%) of diagnoses codes coincide with the OMOP vocabularies. The biggest obstacles are missing mappings for the Local Vocabularies like the Austrian pharmaceutical registration numbers and the Socio-Economic Index to the OMOP vocabularies. OMOP CDM is a promising approach for the standardization of Austrian claims data. In the long run, the benefits of standardization and reproducibility of research should outweigh this initial drawback.