Moving towards using OCL

At AMPATH, we would love to figure out a way to better harmonize our terminology with the broader community. Historically, our plan has been to continue to use our own dictionary but ensure that it remains up to date with CIEL. Unfortunately, this hasn’t worked all that well. We’ve often felt we don’t have the time to wait for new concepts to be created by outside party. This may not be true.

Moving forward, we’d like to figure out a way utilize OCL without losing the autonomy we need to, when necessary quickly create our own concepts. Is there specific guidance for how to utilize OCL? Do we need to reserve certain concept_id ranges to allow us to do this. Or does the internal id structure no longer matter and the OCL module handles the synchronizations itself?

Following up on an earlier post (which I’ll remove to focus here). Is there an SOP for getting requesting new concepts?

Thanks for all your help.

Just want to make sure @akanter, @paynejd and @burke are aware of this post.

JJ, OCL will handle all the synching with your local dictionary and won’t touch your locally created concepts. We hope to incorporate a request mechanism directly into OCL, but for now, it still goes through me via email or spreadsheet. We work closely with @ball at PIH and get out concepts to them quickly. I think we could do the same with AMPATH. I believe the only thing necessary to assign an existing concept to a CIEL concept is to add the CIEL mapping, so you should be able to add them and then synch later. One caveat is that CIEL will often use best practices when creating concepts which your local folks might not do. It is better to wait a couple of weeks for the released version before making any committed steps, if you can.

Thanks Andy! How does OCL handle existing concepts which have been mapped? For example, say we have a concept, malaria, which we created internally and then later mapped to CIEL. Will the OCL sync module download the CIEL malaria concept into our dictionary? Or will it recognize there’s an existing mapped concept in our local dictionary and therefore not import the concept. I am hoping it’s the case that we will not end up with two malaria concepts!

Thanks, we will begin sending you our concepts. Let us know best practices for how to send you this information. It would be great if we could simply create a google spreadsheet and send you the link. We will keep it updated and you/team can let us know when the concepts have been created.

It would be great to agree ahead of time the columns of this spreadsheet to make as clear as possible for you what we are requesting. Do you have an existing template we can work off of?

Also, I suspect others in the community may be interested in the concepts being requested. I know we would be interested in what others are doing. Is there an easy way to make these requests publicly available?

Thanks for all your help!

Hi JJ, great to hear that you’d like to explore using OCL to better harmonize with CIEL. As I’m sure you’re aware, Rafal developed the OpenMRS/OCL Subscription Module which has been released, however it has not gone through much real-world testing. If you’re up for it, I’d love to use this as a chance to test the module and subscription process and to jointly develop a process that will work for you and that could be reused by others. Meaning we could put a guide together to walk someone through it. For your specific questions about how local concepts are retained or mapped to newly published CIEL concepts, we should probably jump on a call with Rafal and get into the details. We have spreadsheet templates that have been used in previous projects that I can share.

Jon

@paynejd, we’d definitely be interested in serving as a testing ground for the OCL module. Let’s set up a call in the near future to discuss.

@akanter, just following up on a suggested template to share concepts with you. We’ll create a google doc and share with you for this purpose. Please let us know your edits.

Thanks to you both.