Translations:Medical classification/34/en

ICD

The International Classification of Disease (ICD) is the most widely recognized medical classification. Maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), its primary purpose is to categorise diseases for morbidity and mortality reporting. However the coded data is often used for other purposes too; including reimbursement practices such as medical billing. ICD has a hierarchical structure, and coding in this context, is the term applied when representations are assigned to the words they represent. Coding diagnoses and procedures is the assignment of codes from a code set that follows the rules of the underlying classification or other coding guidelines. The current version of the ICD, ICD-10, was endorsed by WHO in 1990. WHO Member states began using the ICD-10 classification system from 1994 for both morbidity and mortality reporting. The exception was the US, who only began using it for reporting mortality in 1999 whilst continuing to use ICD-9-CM for morbidity reporting. The US only adopted its version of ICD-10 in October 2015. The delay meant it was unable to compare US morbidity data with the rest of the world during this period. The next major version of the ICD, ICD-11, was ratified by the 72nd World Health Assembly on 25 May 2019, and member countries have been able to report data using ICD-11 codes since 1 January 2022. ICD-11 is a fully digital product with integration of clinical terminology and classification. It allows documentation at any level of detail. It includes extension codes, a terminology system, with medicaments, chemicals, infections agents, histopathology, anatomy and mechanisms, objects and animals, and other elements that serve to describe sources of injury or harm.