About OCL

OCL is an open-source, cloud-based platform for collaborative terminology management.

Use OCL to harmonize your health data across platforms and to enable interoperability, so that you can better use your health information to improve health.

The aim of OCL is to increase liquidity of data across organizational boundaries by improving the usability of your data. It gives users access to the most commonly used sources of standard health terminology. The platform allows users to map local concepts/codes to internationally standardized terminology, which makes data interoperable with more reporting systems.

Users can use OCL to facilitate dictionary harmonization, information exchange, and reuse of analytics tools and approaches. By managing and sharing this information, communities of practice can accelerate convergence on best practices for data and data dictionary harmonization, information exchange, and reuse of analytics tools and approaches. This toolset includes innovative features that provide essential benefits to users at the facility and government level.

The Basics

• Concepts represent unique ideas or definitions, such as Ebola. Codes uniquely identify concepts, for example A98.4, which is the identifier for Ebola in WHO ICD-10. All together this can be represented as WHO : ICD-10 : A98.4 "Ebola virus".
• Mappings define relationships between two Concepts. For example, WHO : ICD-10 : A98.4 "Ebola virus disease" is the same as IHTSDO : SNOMED-CT : 37109004 "Ebola virus disease" defines a
• Sources such as ICD-10 are used by users or organizations to create and manage Concepts and Mappings
• Collections are used to logically group or subset concepts and mappings, such as a Oncology Starter Set.

####What does OCL allow me to do?

OCL allows users to:

• access the standardized sources of concepts like ICD-10, SNOMED, LOINC, etc
• create subsets of data elements specific to a domain, age group, geography or condition
• collaborate with other health informatics officers and organizations to build customized dictionaries
• subscribe to the customized dictionaries of other organizations
• share customized subsets, collections or dictionaries with other organizations
• review and adopt xxxxx talk about QMs here
• compare xxxx
• see how concepts map to each other across dictionaries, allowing more dynamic measurement and ensuring interoperability

History

Jon Payne of OCL and Andy Kanter of CIEL have been working together since 2010 on making the CIEL dictionary as accessible as possible for eHealth or mHealth applications in LMIC. This release of OCL makes it possible to subscribe to the CIEL dictionary through a user's existing OpenMRS instance. With OCL’s subsetting and collaborative functionalities, this represents a major step forward in making the CIEL dictionary more customizable for users.

Columbia International eHealth Laboratory (CIEL)

The Columbia International eHealth Laboratory (CIEL) grew out of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to create an eHealth program at Columbia University. Originally a collaboration between the Mailman School of Public Health's Department of Epidemiology, the College of Physician and Surgeons' Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Earth Institute, this eHealth program fostered joint work around eHealth and mHealth projects in several low and middle income countries. Part of this joint work included development of a common health data dictionary (the CIEL/MVP dictionary) and a common eHealth platform (Millennium Villages Global Network) which are now maintained by CIEL. CIEL supports innovative eHealth and mHealth work by students, faculty and the global community, using standards-based and open source software and technologies.