On Tuesday, July 8, the first panel discussion of the 2025 AIM-AHEAD Annual Meeting took place, entitled “Empowering Progress: Data Requests Driving AIM-AHEAD Programs”. This panel was moderated by Dr. Paul Avillach, AIM-AHEAD MPI, AIM-AHEAD Infrastructure Core Lead, and Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.

The panel included six participants from across the AIM-AHEAD Consortium:

• Dr. Claudia Der-Martirosian; OCHIN Principal Investigator
• Dr. Rajbir Singh; AIM-AHEAD RCO Director and Southeast-Meharry Hub Co-Investigator
• Jessica Lyons; Associate Director of Research and Development in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School
• Dr. Nawar Shara; AIM-AHEAD Data Science Training Core Site PI, Chief of Research Data Science at MedStar Health Research Institute, and Georgetown University’s Chief of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Applications and AI COLab Founding Co-Director
• Dr. Wyatt Bensken; Research Investigator at OCHIN
• Prabhjeet Singh; Project Manager for MedStar Health Research Institute

The session focused on the partnership between OCHIN and the AIM-AHEAD Data Research Core (DRC). The DRC’s mission is to broaden the scope of healthcare data in artificial intelligence and machine learning and expand its availability for research. The DRC is not a single database, but an ecosystem of data sources that support the development of AI/ML models. OCHIN is one of the data sources used within the DRC.

For each AIM-AHEAD-funded project requesting OCHIN data, a customized data view is created. The panel shared data on OCHIN access by program and year, AIM-AHEAD project topics by year, and a summary of data requests. They shared that the most commonly requested data types included basic demographic data, census tract and ZIP code data, followed by mortality data. Immunizations were the least frequently requested. 

This discussion reinforced the critical role of customized data access in advancing AIM-AHEAD’s mission and conveyed the importance of continued collaboration across the consortium.