Blog
Announcing the 2024 OCL Fellowship!
I’m thrilled to announce and welcome Julia Fuller as the new 2024 OCL Fellow! Julia will be working closely throughout the Summer with the OCL team and the OpenHIE Terminology Services subcommunity to develop the National Health Data Dictionary (NHDD) Toolkit. Get to know Julia Fuller Julia is currently pursuing her MPH at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health with a focus on health policy and management. Prior to pursuing her MPH full time, Julia worked as a research...
Upcoming event: OCL Quarterly Showcase – Wednesday 10 April
Join us for the OCL Quarterly Showcase on Wednesday, April 10 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! Since the start of 2024, we have made notable progress on improving the technical foundations of OCL, along with enhancements to the OCL tooling...
2024 OCL Community Roadmap
The OCL community is excited to announce the launch of our Open Concept Lab (OCL) 2024 Community Roadmap! This promises to be a year centered around strengthening connections across our diverse global community of terminology users, developers, and partners. Our OCL Community Roadmap sets goals for OCL’s open-source tools and for the community at large. There are 3 key efforts that are shaping the 2024’s roadmap: OCL v3 and the Smart Dictionary Initiative - In 2023, the OCL community announced...
OCL Selected for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Health Equity Initiative!
Open Concept Lab (OCL) will receive computing credits and technical expertise from Amazon Web Services for supporting hosting and infrastructure to scale the centrally hosted instances of the OCL open source software and development infrastructure. We are excited to announce that the Open Concept Lab (OCL) was selected as part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Health Equity Initiative, a $60 million, three-year commitment, supporting organizations that are developing solutions to advance...
In Case You Missed It: January 2024 OCL Quarterly Showcase
On Wednesday 24 January 2024, OCL hosted another quarterly showcase to share some of the current works-in-progress with the community, plus our upcoming plans. 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: Auto ID assignment Auto sorting for new mappings Improved mapping filters Import/export capabilities Other items that were highlighted include: First look at the...
Celebrating 2023 and a sneak preview of OCL’s 2024 Year of Community!
2023 Year in Review The OCL Community experienced transformative growth over 2023, with 80% growth in user accounts in OCL Online! We announced the Smart Dictionaries Community Initiative, officially launched the OCL FHIR Core (beta) and kicked off development on OCLv3 that we aim to launch in 2024, which will come with a host of new features and usability improvements. We established a statement of understanding with Health Level 7 and started work with the World Health Organization to...
Upcoming event: OCL Quarterly Showcase – Wednesday 24 January
Join us for the OCL Quarterly Showcase on Wednesday, January 24 at 8am ET/1pm UTC/4pm 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! Since this is our first showcase of 2024, we also plan to briefly walk through the 2024 OCL Roadmap, where we will look ahead at the progress we will be...
OCL at 2023 HELINA in Cape Town
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. OCL talks NHDDs at the HELINA...
Upcoming event: OCL Quarterly Showcase – Wednesday 11 October
Join us for the OCL Quarterly Showcase on Wednesday, October 11 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:...
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...