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This blog post was written by Jonathan Payne, who is a project lead for OCL, a public health informaticist, and an instructor in global health. Jonathan is also co-chair of the OpenHIE Terminology Services Sub-community and provides technical assistance to international development agencies. |
I’m excited to announce the launch of the 2023 OCL Community Roadmap. More than ever before, the roadmap represents the voices of the growing OCL community. It was developed through a series of open calls and discussion forums incorporating the requests and requirements of dozens of organizations.
The roadmap lays out a set of goals for OCL’s tools, services, and the community at large. Contributing organizations are noted by each goal, as well as resource gaps. Community members are encouraged to collaborate on and champion goals and address resource gaps. Please reach out to info@openconceptlab.org to get involved and be listed as a stakeholder next to one of the goals.
Take a look at the summary below, or jump over to the full 2023 OCL Community Roadmap to provide feedback and see how you can get involved.
2023 OCL Roadmap Summary
Tools
| Category | Goal | Driving Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| OCL FHIR Corebeta | Launch the new OCL FHIR Corebeta and preload HL7 FHIR terminology content** in OCL Online. *OCL FHIR Core is based on the FHIR R4 specification **See “Definitions JSON” under Resource Collections at https://terminology.hl7.org/downloads.html |
Use OCL to author or adapt FHIR-based computable guidelines (i.e. SMART Guidelines, PEPFAR DASH) into your information architecture. |
| Multi-server Browsing & Management | Enable the TermBrowser to interact with terminology resources from multiple OCL and FHIR terminology servers simultaneously, including the WHO ICD-11 FHIR service. | Support emerging federated models with multiple publication services (e.g. WHO ICD-11 FHIR service, SMART Guidelines, OCL Online). |
| TermBrowser Design System | Introduce a design system that provides design guidance to code contributors and implement it across OCL’s tools. | Create a more consistent and intuitive user experience across OCL’s online presence and lower barriers to community code contributions. |
| Dynamic Collection Workflows | Implement workflows that leverage OCL’s new dynamic collection features in the TermBrowser, including advanced expansions, smarter versioning, repository comparisons, and more. | Make it easier to adapt terminologies to local requirements and to maintain content as best practices and standards evolve over time. |
| Collaboration Workflows & Notifications | Implement collaborative features, including concept proposals, translation suggestions, review and approval workflow, and automated change notifications, to facilitate community feedback, reuse of high quality terminology content, and peer learning. | Allow users to interface with terminology publishers to suggest changes to the content, or to open up content for feedback from terminology experts. |
| OpenMRS Dictionary Management | Implement remaining features that OpenMRS Dictionary Managers need to build and subscribe to concept dictionaries directly inside the OCL TermBrowser, such as sorted mappings, concept cloning, concept customizations, and linked sources. | Prepare OCL for production-level subscription and management of source-based OpenMRS concept dictionaries. |
| Internationalization | Add support for multiple user interface translations in the TermBrowser and expand multilingual support for managed terminologies (e.g. country codes, custom attributes). | Improve accessibility of the OCL Toolkit for users globally with better internationalization. |
| Cybersecurity & Compliance | Rollout single-sign on, advanced permissions, and cybersecurity controls to support more deployment configurations and compliance with WHO/USG requirements. | OCL capable of complying with strict cybersecurity requirements of government/enterprise deployments, particularly for WHO to deploy OCL in their Azure and for PEPFAR to use OCL Online in production. |
Services
| Category | Goal | Driving Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| OCL Online | Publish and maintain key reference terminologies, including HL7 FHIR Terminologies, PEPFAR MER indicators, CIEL, SNOMED GPS, and others. Continue to improve OCL Online infrastructure, including performance, analytics, and system administration. | Any LMIC implementer of OpenMRS, SMART Guidelines, etc. can collect and reuse pre-loaded standard, emerging, and custom terminology content from a one-stop shop for common emerging data exchange use cases. |
| User Support | Establish processes, tools and documentation to provide user support, report bugs, etc. | Any user of OCL can identify and participate in processes to report issues, ask for technical support, and stay up to date with fixes or enhancements. |
| Client Technical Assistance | Setup partnership-based technical assistance models to augment resources for OCL implementers. | OCL implementers can get the technical assistance that they need with terminology implementation and adoption. |
Community
| Category | Goal | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Community / User Engagement | Create forums, tools, and online spaces for community events, community-led discussions and peer learning. | Foster a culture that promotes: 1) The ability for users to identify themselves as community members and co-owners of OCL; and 2) Easily accessible peer-learning for OCL features, strategies, and best practices. |
| Communications | Optimize the communication strategy to maintain regular communications and outreach by promoting the OCL identity, value, community voices, and growth. | OCL community is aware of new features, resources and impact stories and users feel invested in and contribute to the progress, tools, and contributions of OCL. |
| Learning Materials | Coordinate the development and revision of materials to support the use, management, deployment, and development of the OCL Toolkit. | Users have the resources they need to effectively use OCL. |
| Community Governance | Create the first OCL Strategic Roadmap to guide organizational and business development and community governance. | OCL community has transparent governance with well-defined opportunities to influence the community’s evolution. |