International classification of diseases
International Classification of Diseases (ICD)
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a globally recognized health care classification system maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO). It provides codes to classify diseases and a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or diseases.
Pronunciation
In-ter-na-tion-al Clas-si-fi-ca-tion of Dis-eas-es
Etymology
The term "International Classification of Diseases" is derived from the purpose of the system. It is an international standard for defining health conditions and diseases for consistent reporting and analysis across different regions of the world.
Related Terms
- Disease: A particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not due to any immediate external injury.
- World Health Organization: A specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health.
- Health care: The maintenance or improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, recovery, or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people.
- Classification system: A system for classifying things into groups based on similarities or common criteria.
- Medical coding: The transformation of healthcare diagnosis, procedures, medical services, and equipment into universal medical alphanumeric codes.
History
The ICD has been revised and published in a series of editions to reflect advances in health and medical science over time. The current version is the ICD-10, but the ICD-11 has been adopted by the World Health Assembly and is set to come into effect in 2022.
Usage
The ICD is used across the world for morbidity and mortality statistics, reimbursement systems, and automated decision support in health care. This system is designed to promote international comparability in the collection, processing, classification, and presentation of these statistics.
See Also
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