DevCon 2025 Spotlights Open-Source Innovation, Sustainability, and the Future

The OHDSI community hosted DevCon 2025, the fourth annual gathering dedicated to advancing open-source development and collaboration, on April 25. This event brought together developers and innovators to explore the latest tools, technologies, and strategies shaping the future of open-source software in healthcare and data science. The event kicked off with an exciting series of talks showcasing cutting-edge OHDSI projects, including updates on core infrastructure, cohort construction, and novel integrations with modern data platforms.

That session followed with a  dynamic developer dialogue on key topics such as DevOps, DBT, and the growing role of large language models in open-source development. This interactive session provided insights from industry leaders on emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities in the evolving open-source landscape. 

The day concluded with a panel on building sustainable open-source ecosystems, where experts shared their experiences in fostering long-term collaboration, innovation, and community-driven development. As the open-source movement continues to grow, understanding sustainable models becomes more critical than ever.

Videos from all presentations are posted below.

Videos

The opening was led by Paul Nagy (Johns Hopkins), who provided an overview of the open-source environment within the OHDSI global community.

The first session focused on OHDSI open-source projects, and featured six lightning talks, which are shared below:
0:00 – Stabilizing Gaia Core – Robert Miller, Miller Data Solutions
20:42 – CustomVocabularyBuilder – Jared Houghtaling, Tufts University
40:22 – CohortConstructor – Núria Mercadé-Besora, University of Oxford
59:40 – Experiences with SQLMesh/CICD integration with Databricks – Vishnu Chandrabalan, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
1:22:05 – Updates from the Technical Advisory Board – Frank Defalco, Johnson & Johnson
1:30:20 – Updates on Strategus – Anthony Sena, Johnson & Johnson

The second session hosted a conversation between developers within the community. The title of the session was “Developer dialogue: Dev ops, DBT and, of course, LLMs” and the panel included:
• Eduard Korchmar, EPAM Systems
• Egill Fridgeirsson, Erasmus MC
• Martin Lavallee, Boehringer Ingelheim
• Lawrence Adams, Artificial Intelligence Centre for Value Based Healthcare
• Moderator: Katy Sadowski, Boehringer Ingelheim
The third session featured a panel discussion on building a sustainable open-source ecosystem and featured:
• Data4Life – Peter Hoffmann
• The Hyve – Jan Blom/Wouter Franke
• Cognome – James Green
• Moderators: Paul Nagy, Sean O’Reilly
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