OMOP in Sweden
In 2018 a couple of leaders in Sweden started to explore the world of OMOP. They were the first early adopters. It was AstraZeneca and WHO's Uppsala Monitoring Center. They took initiative to form part of the consortium for the EHDEN initiative funded through the Innovative Medicines Initiative, supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA.
A few organisations have followed them and become data partners with either EHDEN Foundation and/or EMA's DARWIN-EU. For example, the department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) at Karolinska Institutet, the department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences (BKV) at Linköping University, who have mapped the Swedish Inflammatory Bowel Disease Registry to OMOP, and finally the research project SCIFI-PEARL (Swedish Covid-19 Investigation for Future Insights – a Population Epidemiology Approach using Register Linkage) at Gothenburg University. This last data set has recently, April 2025, also become the first Swedish data partner within EMA's DARWIN-EU network.
More organisations are starting to explore the potential of OMOP and the methods and tools from the open-science network OHDSI. Below you can read more about the early adopters of OMOP, OHDSI and federated analysis in Sweden. If you know of any organisation not listed below, please let us know.
KI MEB has implemented OMOP on a data set enabling studies on overall health and health-/elder care use in older adults in Sweden. They mapped their Swedish register data to the OMOP Common Data Model through the EHDEN program and became a data partner to the EHDEN Foundation. Their main research focus is on pharmacoepidemiological and drug use. KI MEB has also used OMOP CDM on a data set connected to the Stockholm CREAtinine Measurements project that was initiated in 2010 in collaboration with the healthcare provider of Stockholm County healthcare to quantify potential medication errors, estimate the burden of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and to illustrate the value of incorporating measures of kidney function into the medi- cal decision process. This data set is also mapped through the EHDEN program. Hence, it is also a data partner to the EHDEN Foundation.
Fredrik Nyberg was one of the first leaders promoting the use of OMOP in Sweden, during his time as AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca, through the work of Fredrik, was one of the sponsors of the successful European EHDEN Program that standardized and harmonized over 200 data sets across Europe with the help of OMOP and OHDSI tools. Fredrik has continued his work with OMOP in different contexts. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, he and his team designed and initiated a nationwide linked multi-register, regularly updated, observational study for timely response to urgent scientific questions (the SCIFI-PEARL Project). This OMOP implementation is the largest and most active in Sweden, and they are a data partner to the EHDEN Foundation. Their data set was in April 2025 also approved to become a data partner to EMA’s DARWIN-EU function, which is now enabling them to participate in five new studies together with EMA and many other data partners in the EU. Läkemedelsverket is collaborating with Fredrik’s team at the University of Gothenburg on these studies as the national node for DARWIN-EU in Sweden. They also have an ongoing collaboration on more studies on COVID vaccination of pregnant women and safety for mother and child.
SWIBREG is a national quality registry with the aim of increasing our knowledge of and improving the care of inflammatory bowel disease. The SWIBREG registry was mapped to OMOP through the EHDEN program, and is now a data partner for the EHDEN Foundation.
Uppsala Monitoring Center (UMC) has, under the leadership of their Chief Science Officer Niklas Norén and others, been an early adopter of OMOP and a strong leader promoting its use within the field of using Real-World Evidence for pharmacovigilance signal management. UMC was just like AstraZeneca also part of the consortium running the EHDEN program, and they have at multiple occasions leveraged OMOP-harmonized health data from federated data networks in their studies. They have a new study ongoing at the moment (2025), and this time they are also including Swedish health data.