An open-source toolkit to support standardized healthcare

OCL is an open-source terminology management platform to help collaboratively manage, publish, and use metadata in the cloud alongside the global community.

This collaborative terminology management platform helps organizations realize the benefit of health information standards and makes this content available to implementers everywhere.

OCL is more than a set of open-source cloud based tools that supports health care terminology. It is a community of terminologists, developers and implementers that help to collaboratively manage, publish and use metadata in the cloud within the global community.

The OCL TermBrowser is the primary tool for searching terminology and other metadata loaded into OCL.

The OCL Terminology Service is the back-bone of the OCL Toolkit. It is an open-source solution for the management and publication of standardized and local terminologies.

OCL Online is the online instance for hosting your terminology service needs in the cloud, without needing to download the software to a private server.

The OpenMRS Dictionary Manager client focused on the workflow of an OpenMRS implementer managing an OpenMRS dictionary within OCL, drawing on concepts & mappings from CIEL, and synchronizing the concept collection as a dictionary on one or more OpenMRS server(s). It has been deprecated — its capabilities now live in the OCL TermBrowser. See Using OCL for OpenMRS concept dictionary management for the recommended workflow.

Implementers have two options when using OCL: (1) cloud-based OCL Online, or (2) self-hosting. We generally recommend that you start with the cloud-hosted OCL Online and only move to self-hosted if you have an actual project need (e.g. using a terminology service to process a high volume of data exchange transactions). Even then, an implementer may benefit from continuing to manage content in OCL Online and simply push the content to a local terminology service for transactional support.

1. Cloud-based OCL Online: One of the main values of OCL is collaborative management of terminology content, where you can take advantage of community-defined content and up-to-date reference terminologies, like LOINC or CIEL, that are maintained by the OCL team. Using OCL Online also alleviates the need to set up your own infrastructure. OCL Online supports all of the same terminology service transactions as a self-host, it is not suited for a high volume transactional support.
2. Self-host: Self-hosting is best suited for implementers that require a high volume of data exchange transactions that are hitting the terminology service. The tradeoff is that in addition to managing your own content, you must also maintain the software and all of your reference content (e.g. SNOMED, LOINC, CIEL, etc.), which is an ongoing (not one-time) activity.

OCL's source code is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/OpenConceptLab

OCL's source code is freely available under the Mozilla Public License v2 with a healthcare disclaimer.

OCL functions similar to a GitHub specifically for health terminology. Meaning, anyone is free to load content, like a data dictionary or value set, to OCL and to make it publicly available.

The OCL team works to publish reference vocabularies, such as LOINC and SNOMED GPS. OCL is also the primary distributor of the CIEL interface terminology, which is used as the basis of open concept dictionaries in many OpenMRS implementations throughout the world.