Jussara Macedo Pinho Rötzsch and Jonathan Payne
HL7 Brasil—the official HL7 International affiliate in Brazil, responsible for promoting and enabling HL7 interoperability standards in the country—and OCL—an international organization dedicated to the development, delivery, and stewardship of the Open Concept Lab platform as a global public good—proudly announce the signing of a partnership to advance open-source, standards-based semantic interoperability in Brazil.
The primary goal of this collaboration is to advance semantic interoperability by combining HL7 standards—particularly FHIR—with robust, open, and governed terminology services provided by OCL. While Brazil has made important progress in syntactic interoperability, true interoperability requires shared meaning. This partnership establishes a values-driven, open-source foundation that positions terminology services as a core component of Brazil’s Digital Public Infrastructure for Health.
At its heart, this effort is about unlocking scalable and sustainable semantic interoperability in Brazil—open, standards-based, and built for real-world care and data exchange. Together, HL7 Brazil and OCL are creating a shared foundation for terminology governance and FHIR-enabled terminology services that can serve the country today and inspire similar efforts globally.
HL7 Brazil is already at the forefront of real-world FHIR implementation, including International Patient Summary (IPS) exchange supported by OCL for terminology management. HL7 Brasil has also been actively collaborating in the development and adoption of OCL prior to the formalization of this partnership. The platform is already being used in Brazil in other high-impact initiatives, including by the National Supplementary Health Agency (ANS) for the governance of TISS.
This partnership is intentionally structured as a national-scale model—combining open terminology infrastructure with country-level governance to deliver measurable health-system value while sustaining an open-source ecosystem. Brazil is positioned to serve as a reference example that other countries can learn from and adapt.
This collaboration has also been strongly supported by HL7 Brasil leadership. Members of the HL7 Brasil Board—including Jussara Macedo Pinho Rötzsch, Beatriz Leão, and Italo Macedo—have directly promoted and operationalized OCL within the Brazilian ecosystem. Notably, Italo Macedo serves as the international lead of the OCL FHIR Squad, contributing to the global evolution of OCL’s FHIR terminology services.
HL7 Brasil’s strategy is grounded in the principle that information models must be terminology-aware by design. Interoperability cannot be achieved solely through message exchange or structural validation; semantic validation is essential. While the ideal scenario is the use of standard terminologies at the point of data capture, Brazil’s significant legacy system landscape requires a pragmatic transition. The OCL Mapper enables controlled, governed, and collaborative mappings that support gradual normalization of legacy data and adoption of international standards such as SNOMED CT.
Both organizations bring a lot to this partnership: HL7 Brazil contributes national leadership, governance insight, and real-world validation, including leadership in development and implementation of the OCL FHIR Service. OCL contributes open-source infrastructure, advanced terminology management and mapping capabilities, and early access to innovations such as AI-powered Terminology Intelligence and FHIR terminology services—addressing one of interoperability’s most persistent bottlenecks: mapping local data to standardized terminology through the AI-enabled OCL Mapper.
The result is a true co-development partnership that strengthens Brazil’s health data ecosystem while advancing open semantic infrastructure globally.
Over the next three years, HL7 Brasil aims to establish OCL as a shared national terminology service, support national initiatives such as RNDS and International Patient Summary (IPS), and advance toward a consolidated National Terminology Center and National Data Dictionary. Success means Brazil operating a shared terminology service that activates data exchange across multiple health domains, supported by sustainable governance and a thriving national community of practice capable of delivering the terminology coverage and capabilities required by the health system.
Beyond these concrete outcomes lies a strategic opportunity: positioning Brazil as a leader in the next generation of AI-enabled health system capabilities. Safe, scalable AI depends on authoritative terminology, complete reference knowledge, and real local context. OCL is building the foundational terminology infrastructure that makes this possible, and HL7 Brazil—through its role as an innovation and implementation leader—will be among the first to validate and realize its impact.
Brazil is helping lead the future toward standards-driven and AI-powered Digital Public Infrastructure for Health, and we are excited to build it together.
Read the full Memorandum of Understanding here
Read the version of this announcement in Portuguese here
Jussara Macedo Pinho Rötzsch is the current president of HL7 Brasil. Jonathan Payne is the executive director of Open Concept Lab