Smart terminology tools for more efficient and equitable healthcare
A FHIR®-enabled open-source platform to collaboratively use, manage and publish terminology alongside the global community
Utilize standard terminologies in your projects...
What people are saying
Trusted across the terminology community
From ministries of health to global NGOs, teams use OCL to manage and share standardized terminology.
Ellen Ball
Software Engineer, Partners In Health“Partners In Health is now managing our OpenMRS concept dictionary with OpenConceptLab for implementations at 4 country sites (Haiti, Liberia, Mexico, Sierra Leone). This is a milestone in supporting many countries, multiple languages, and a global PIH team. It is a transparent and consistent way to share our dictionary, and will save deployment time. It's been a long process with much support along the way. It exemplified the power of open source, teamwork, and the international OpenMRS community. Our hope is that other community members are already using OCL or moving in that direction.”
Amara Okonkwo
Health Informatics Officer, Ministry of Health“TermBrowser lets our clinicians search the exact concept they need in seconds, instead of digging through spreadsheets. It's become the first place our teams look before adding anything new to our dictionary.”
Beatriz de Faria Leão
Brazilian Health Informatics Association“OCL has invested in its FHIR service, making it unique and highly regarded as an open-source terminology service. Brazil has adopted OCL as its terminology service and has even contributed to the improvement of OCL's FHIR Core. We could not have done terminology services without OCL. There was no budget.”
Derek Treatman
Technical Advisor, OpenFn“The OCL Mapper doesn't just save time, it makes the work possible.”
Rafael Costa
Data Systems Lead, implementing partner network“Standing up an OCL organization page gave our country programs one shared source of truth for terminology, instead of five different spreadsheets floating around. The API made it easy to plug straight into our existing tools.”
Blog
Get to know the community
Articles on terminology, our tech, impact stories, case studies and more
June 9, 2026 · 3 min read
Advancing Automated LOINC Mapping in OCL Mapper Through Biomedical NLP
ScispaCy-LOINC, developed at Indiana University, found the right LOINC code for 42.3% of MIMIC-IV lab concepts vs 21.4% for semantic search. Published in JAMIA.
February 17, 2026 · 4 min read
A New Model for National Terminology Services: OCL and HL7 Brasil Announce Partnership
OCL and HL7 Brasil are partnering on a national terminology service for Brazil — open, FHIR-based and governed as Digital Public Infrastructure for Health.
Jussara Macedo Pinho Rötzsch and Jonathan Payne
February 5, 2026 · 11 min read
First year building The Bridge between clinical practice, software, and terminologies (OpenMRS + OCL + CIEL)
Dr. Filipe Lopes on a year as OpenMRS–CIEL–OCL Senior Fellow: 6k+ diagnoses translated into Portuguese, 30k+ CIEL mappings and an AI agent for ICD-11 coding.
Dr. Filipe Lopes
Live from the platform
What's happening on OCL
Tools
OCL's open-source toolkit
Use the OCL Toolkit to collaboratively manage, publish and use terminology
Join our community
Community calls & events
Our community includes software developers, terminologists and others who help create and sustain our platform. Our regular calls offer group discussion and a great place to start contributing to OCL. Joining details and running notes for every call are posted in OCL Chat.
OCL Dev Call
Takes a deep dive into technical topics related to the ongoing development of and integration with OCL tools.
Weekly, Tuesdays
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12:00 UTC
08:00 Eastern
OCL Platform Call
Tracks progress and priorities across OCL’s workstreams. A good place to raise a proposal or find out what the project is working on.
Weekly, Thursdays
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12:00 UTC
08:00 Eastern
CIEL Office Hours
An open session for questions about the CIEL interface terminology and how it is used in OpenMRS implementations.
Weekly, Thursdays
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14:00 UTC
10:00 Eastern
OpenHIE Terminology Services Call
Hosted by the OpenHIE community, which OCL takes part in. Promotes and supports the effective capture, exchange and analysis of clinical data among components of the HIE.
First Friday monthly
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13:00 UTC
09:00 Eastern