Abstract

Medicine and health policies are based on scientific evidence. In addition to prospective randomised clinical trials, real-world data produced during clinical practice are used to create such evidence. This requires standard dictionaries and well-structured data. One such widely used standard is the OMOP (Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership) data model. Its structural and semantic homogeneity simplifies the implementation of standard analyses, making the conduction of studies fast and cheap. The use of OMOP databases in international cooperation ensures data protection, as only anonymised aggregated results are shared with partners. Today, the health data of 12% of the world’s population has been transformed to the OMOP format. Using OMOP databases, Estonia has the opportunity to be at the forefront of developments in the usage of real-world data and to increase the opportunities for domestic and international research collaboration.