International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD)

ICD-11

  • The global standard for health data, clinical documentation, and statistical aggregation
  • Multiple uses, including primary care
  • Scientifically up-to-date
  • Designed for use in a digital world
  • State-of-the-art technology reduces the costs of training and implementation
  • Multilingual design facilitates global use
  • Proposal platform allows stakeholder participation in keeping ICD–11 up-to-date.
  • 17.000 categories, 80.000 concepts, 120.000 terms, >1.6 million clinical terms interpreted

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ICD purpose and uses

ICD is the foundation for the identification of health trends and statistics globally, and the international standard for reporting diseases and health conditions. It is the diagnostic classification standard for all clinical and research purposes. ICD defines the universe of diseases, disorders, injuries and other related health conditions, listed in a comprehensive, hierarchical fashion that allows for:

  • Easy storage, retrieval and analysis of health information for evidenced-based decision-making
  • Sharing and comparing health information between hospitals, regions, settings and countries
  • Data comparisons in the same location across different time periods

Based on clinical input, research and epidemiology, ICD has become a tool that is suiable for many uses in health, as:

  • Monitoring of the incidence and prevalence of diseases,
  • Causes of death
  • External causes of illess
  • Codes for antimicrobial resistance, in line with GLASS
  • Primary care and family medicine concepts have been incorporated into ICD-11
  • Medicaments (INN - ATC), allergens and chemicals, histopathology (ICD-O 3.2), are embedded in ICD-11
  • Codes for full documentation of patient safety, in line with the WHO patient safety framework
  • Dual coding for traditional medicine diagnoses
  • Primary care settings
  • Recording of rare diseases
  • Casemix or Diagnosis Related Groupings (DRG), resource allocation
  • Embedding of guidelines

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

History of ICD

ICD-11 has been adopted by the Seventy-second World Health Assembly in May 2019 and comes into effect on 1 January 2022.

The first international classification edition, known as the International List of Causes of Death, was adopted by the International Statistical Institute in 1893. The ICD has since been revised and published in a series of revisions to reflect advances in health and medical science over time. The eleventh revision has been a time warp  - moving ICD to the 21st century, the digital era.

WHO was entrusted with the ICD at its creation in 1948 and published the 6th version, ICD-6, that incorporated morbidity for the first time. The WHO Nomenclature Regulations, adopted in 1967, stipulate that Member States use the most current ICD revision for national and international recording and reporting mortality and morbidity statistics.

ICD-10 was endorsed in May 1990 by the Forty-third World Health Assembly. It is cited in more than 20,000 scientific articles and used by more than 150 countries around the world and has been translated into more than 40 languages. With the need for more detailed recording and reporting a number of clinical modifications or specialty adaptations proliferated over time. ICD-11 reunites the different modifications and adaptations, adds clinical needs and more, migrating ICD from a mere statistical framework to a clinical classification for statitical use.

ICD Revision

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