Partners In Health (PIH) is now managing our OpenMRS concept dictionary with OpenConceptLab (OCL) for implementations at 4 country sites (Haiti, Liberia, Mexico, Sierra Leone). This is a milestone in supporting many countries, multiple languages, and a global PIH team. It is a transparent and consistent way to share our dictionary, and will save deployment time.
It’s been a long process with much support along the way. It exemplified the power of open source, teamwork, and the international OpenMRS community. Our hope is that other community members are already using OCL or moving in that direction.
This is definitely a huge milestone - for PIH and OCL and OpenMRS, and also specifically for our OCL Module. @PIH really have tremendous expertise in medical concept management in our community. So, having the PIH team using this module is already translating into very helpful fixes and improvements to the OCL Module which is a hugely positive direction in terms of the sustainability of this centralized approach to concept management. Special kudos to @mseaton there
PIH is also a perfect example of the ideal use case of OCL with OpenMRS: Where an implementer needs to manage concepts across many very different distributions.
@ball I am considering copying PIH’s model of mostly using Sources in OCL, at least until the Collections GUI flows are a bit better supported - the one thing I’m a little intimidated by is tracking all the changes to CIEL concepts whenever there’s a new release of CIEL. May I ask: How do you folks at PIH plan to track changes in CIEL now that you’re “live on OCL” with concepts that are mapped to CIEL?
Haven’t worried about this yet. In the past, we tracked any updates to CIEL unless we searched manually. OCL will provide tools to compare 2 concepts in the future. PIH has managed our own concept dictionary for almost 19 (!) years and before CIEL existed. If I was starting an implementation now, I wouldn’t have so many non-CIEL concepts. CIEL is an amazing resource.
Collections is a much preferred path for users of CIEL concepts and will maintain connection to the CIEL source dictionary. Hopefully collection glitches will resolve soon.
Congratulations @ball and PIH! This is a huge accomplishment by you and all of the people who contributed to “OCL for OpenMRS” over the years! I remember sitting with you at the PIH office many many years ago to run the first import of the PIH dictionary into OCL, having no idea that it would take entirely refactoring OCL and creating a Dictionary Manager app before we’d be ready for this step
The OCL community is really excited to continue to make it easier to collaboratively manage an OpenMRS concept dictionary in OCL v3, which will be released later this year. One exciting upcoming feature is automated comparisons of dictionary versions, which, for example, will tell you exactly what has changed between releases of CIEL, making it easier to update your dictionary to the latest source content. We hope to demo this on an OCL for OpenMRS Squad Call later this month for those who are interested in learning more!
