Blog
OCL Search Improvements: Enhancing Precision and User Experience
This blog is written by Sunny Aggarwal. Sunny is a Python Developer in the Open Concept Lab (OCL) team. He has been working as a core contributor in OCL for many years now and currently leads the OCL software tools enhancement work. Introduction In this blog post, we will explore the recent improvements made to the Open Concept Lab (OCL) search, an open-source terminology service developed using React, Python, Django, Postgres, and ElasticSearch (ES). Our aim is to provide users with a...
What’s The Latest with National Health Data Dictionaries? (NHDDs)
Did you know that OCL participated in the 2023 OpenHIE Community Meeting (#OHIE23)? This meeting was attended by 280 digital health professionals from across 33 different countries. At #OHIE23 there were several unconference (participant-led) sessions on many different health information exchange topics, including one on National Health Data Dictionaries (NHDDs). What did we learn at the NHDD session? This NHDD unconference session was attended by over 50 participants from 20 countries. Many...
Coming in 2024 – OCLv3: The first step towards Smart Dictionaries
This blog is written by Joe Amlung. Joe is a Technical Advisor for the Regenstrief Institute’s Global Health Informatics team. He has focused on terminology management for several years, particularly by working with the Open Concept Lab (OCL) tools and the OpenMRS and OpenHIE Terminology Services community. He works with community members to help them adopt terminology as part of their work, leading to standardized data for better interoperability. What is the Smart Dictionary...
In Case You Missed It: July 2023 OCL Quarterly Showcase
On Wednesday 12 July 2023, OCL hosted another quarterly showcase to share some of the current works-in-progress with the community. Weren’t able to attend? Not a problem! Let’s summarize everything we discussed and we’ll also share how you can learn more. During this session we showcased new OCL features: Quicker concept creation Collection Summary Tab Improvements to OCL Search Other items that were highlighted include: OCL Chat (our community forum) is now live - learn more & join at...
Upcoming event: OCL Quarterly Showcase – Wednesday 12 July
Join us for the OCL Quarterly Showcase on Wednesday, July 12 at 8am ET/12pm UTC/3pm EAT! There is a lot of amazing work happening in and around the Open Concept Lab community. This is a chance to celebrate our progress, learn about the latest achievements/upgrades, and discuss upcoming initiatives for the OCL tools, services, and community! Please see below for the meeting link and dial-in instructions. We can’t wait to see you there! Join from computer or mobile:...
Terminology management is getting smarter
Key takeaways: Guided workflows will help users to quickly complete the most common terminology management tasks, like creating mappings and dynamic references Seamless integration of FHIR into the TermBrowser Nudge users toward best practices for terminology management, like reuse of curated content Through regular feedback sessions, we’re hearing that some of the most common terminology management tasks, like creating mappings or dynamic references, aren’t as easy as they could be. And many...
Announcing the OCL FHIR Core (beta)!
We are excited to announce that the OCL FHIR Corebeta has been launched! Here’s a quick rundown: What is the OCL FHIR Corebeta? The OCL FHIR Corebeta integrates HL7 FHIR Terminology Service capabilities based on the R4 specification directly into the OCL core. Building FHIR directly into the OCL core means that users can seamlessly switch between FHIR requests and OCL API requests for the same content, providing flexibility and powerful capabilities that are not available in FHIR. Which FHIR...
Using OCL for OpenMRS Concept Dictionary Management
This blog written by Joe Amlung. Joe is a Technical Advisor for the Regenstrief Institute's Global Health Informatics team. He has focused on terminology management for several years, particularly by working with the Open Concept Lab (OCL) tools and the OpenMRS and OpenHIE Terminology Services community. He works work community members to help them adopt terminology as part of their work, leading to standardizes data for better interoperability. This blog post serves as a guide for new...
Deprecating the OpenMRS Dictionary Manager and transitioning to OCL TermBrowser
This blog written by Suruchi Dhungana. Suruchi is a Total Product Management and Development fellow at OpenMRS who works basically for Dictionary Manager and OCL. She is passionate about solving the user’s problems and pain-points, and has been advocating the user's voice for content management in Dictionary Manager. She holds a bachelor degree in Computer Science for Tribhuvan University, Nepal. She has more than 5 years of experience working in OpenMRS, EHR and content management both as a...
2023 OCL Community Roadmap
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...