Live EMA PMS Demo and Adoption Insights: Key Takeaways from the Pistoia Alliance IDMP-Ontology Webinar

The Pistoia Alliance’s latest IDMP-Ontology Community of Interest webinar went well beyond a product update. Heiner Oberkampf, CEO and Co-Founder of ACCURIDS, and Raphael Sergent, Head of QA and Pharma Solution Lead at ACCURIDS, joined Sheila Elz, Senior RIM Manager from Boehringer Ingelheim and Aditya Tyagi, Project Manager from Pistoia Alliance to show where the IDMP-Ontology stands today, how major pharma companies are using it, and what a live EMA PMS alignment looks like in practice.

‍
IDMP-Ontology V1.4 is public and ready for much more than EMA PMS

A central message from the session: IDMP-Ontology version 1.4 is publicly available as open source - and it already supports far more than EMA PMS alone. Heiner Oberkampf showed how the ontology has grown to more than 200 connected modules, shaped by years of real pharma use cases across regulatory, CMC, supply chain, and product data standardization.

That scale is not theoretical. Based on a questionnaire across nine organizations, ACCURIDS mapped which parts of the IDMP-Ontology are actually in use today, and the picture is broader than a single compliance scenario. EMA PMS is the most urgent example right now, but the same public release underpins multiple live applications already running in major pharma environments.

For teams evaluating readiness, the ontology is not a future dependency - it is something you can download and start working with today.

‍

Why shared language comes before interoperability

Sheila Elz, Senior RIM Manager at Boehringer Ingelheim and co-initiator of the IDMP-Ontology project, reminded the audience why pre-competitive collaboration under Pistoia Alliance has produced something no single company could build alone:

‍

"This pre-competitive collaboration that has been possible together that wouldn't be possible in isolation. The product that we've created is different than each company individually could create."

‍

Over years of community work, the IDMP-Ontology has become more than a technical model - a shared artifact that gives the industry a common language to build from.

‍

The live demo: EMA PMS alignment in one framework

The most practical segment was Raphael Sergent’s live walkthrough of EMA PMS Data Alignment - the approach that won TOPRA’s innovation category last year.

In the demo, he showed what data matching actually looks like in practice: EMA PMS records compared against internal RIM data, discrepancies surfaced in real time, and corrections made toward enrichment and resolution. The point was not abstract architecture - it was a working workflow for EMA PMS today. Raphael Sergent also made clear that EMA PMS is not the end state - similar requirements from other authorities are coming, and the same foundation is built to extend without starting from scratch each time.

‍

"We use the IDMP ontology in the center as a framework to just align data coming from various sources into a common framework, so we can actually then compare the data one to another."

‍

What to do next

Watch the full session to see the live data matching workflow and the broader discussion on adoption and data quality.

‍

Watch the webinar recording →
‍

Mark your calendar for the next Community of Interest discussion on September 16th.

‍