What we are looking for:

• Candidates with a strong quantitative background who are highly motivated, eager to learn, and demonstrate initiative in their work.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills are desired.
• Interest in the healthcare domain. 

What we offer:  

• Projects addressing real-world problems using a large primary care database. 
• Regular meetings with a dedicated supervisor.
• An internship allowance from Erasmus Medical Center.

If you are interested, please send your application including CV, motivation, preferred timeline for completing the thesis, and research interests (if you have them) to Ilse Schuemie (healthdatascience@erasmusmc.nl) before November 16th, 2025. Interviews will take place early December.

At the beginning of October, several members of our group attended the OHDSI Global Symposium in New Brunswick, where they presented their work, led workshops, and explored new collaborations within the global OHDSI community.

It was an inspiring and productive event, filled with fascinating research and great discussions. We are proud to share that our team’s efforts were recognized with multiple awards!

• Aniek and Maarten received a Titan Award for their work on the Treatment Patterns package.
• The entire DARWIN EU® team was also honored with a Titan Award for their impactful contributions to the OHDSI community.

Overall, it was a very successful and rewarding symposium!

Check out this recently published JMIR paper by Clair Blacketer (PhD student in HDS group) offering a comprehensive overview of the data sources within the European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN), focusing on the 210 health data sources from 30 countries mapped to the OMOP Common Data Model. It highlights the diversity and scale of real-world data across Europe, illustrating the potential of federated data networks to enhance the generation of reliable evidence. By emphasizing the breadth of data within the network, this work underscores how these resources can be leveraged to support future health research and improve the generalizability of evidence.

The 6th European OHDSI Symposium – Join the Network: Advancing Real-World Evidence in Europe – took place on July 5-7, 2025, in Hasselt, Belgium, bringing together researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders to explore the latest developments in OMOP-CDM, open-source tools, and collaborative projects that harness the power of networks to generate impactful evidence. Pre-symposium workshops and tutorials were held on July 5 and 6.

This marked the first time that this event ventured beyond its traditional home in Rotterdam. The symposium was held at the iconic Old Prison building of Hasselt University, providing a unique blend of historic ambiance and cutting-edge innovation.

More information, posters, session recordings, and more can be found on the uHasselt website: here.

The fifth iteration of this event was fully booked, with 360 participants, 25 plenary presentations, 130 posters, and 13 software demonstrations. Members of our team contributed during the collaborator showcase, pleanary presentations, posters, and software demonstrations, as well as leading workshops and workgroups on the weekend. 

Thank you to all participants for the inspiring talks, discussions, and chats!

A full summary of the symposium can be found on the OHDSI Europe Website.

The main symposium will take place on Monday, June 3^rd, 2024 on the ship SS Rotterdam. Saturday, June 1^st, and Sunday, June 2^nd will be dedicated to workshops and workgroup meetings, to be held in the Education Centre of the Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.  

For more information, registration, and call for participation: click here.

Hope to see you all there!

The conference had several thousand delegates and covered a wide range of informatics topics, from technology to be implemented at the bedside, to analysis of real-world data. It was clear that there is lots of motivation for generating better machine learning and AI focused tools for implementation into routine healthcare.

One thing of note is that Ross chose to follow the Erasmus MC green initiative and went to Gothenburg by train. This journey was spread across 2 days and involved 12 hours of train travel with a stop in Copenhagen and Hamburg. This trip comes highly recommended by Ross.

The fourth iteration of this event was fully booked, with 350 participants, 23 plenary presentations, and 94 posters. Members of our team contributed during the collaborator showcase, pleanary presentations, workshops, workgroups, posters, and software demonstrations. 

Thank you to all participants for the inspiring talks, discussions, and chats!

A full summary of the symposium can be found on the OHDSI Europe Website.

The first paper analyses explanation disagreements by investigating discrepancies of feature importance rankings in real-world primary care data.

The second paper proposes a method to evaluate the ability of counterfactual explanation generation methods (i.e. explanations of the form 'if X had not occurred, Y would not have occurred') to satisfy causal relations.

Check out the workshop papers here: Interpretable Machine Learning for Healthcare and Counterfactuals in Minds & Machines.