The ICD-11 revision
In development since 2007, ICD-11 is intended not only to rectify
deficiencies in ICD-10 and to incorporate changes demanded by scientific
advances, but also to take advantage of the revolution in electronic
data handling since the publication of ICD-10 a quarter of a century
ago.
ICD-11 is regarded as a suite of classifications, which is based on a
detailed and comprehensive polyhierarchical web-like foundation in which
any single disease entity may be represented in more than one location
(3). The innovatory electronic authoring and browsing platforms
developed for the ICD Revision Project enabled ICD-11 to be assembled
and refined in a sophisticated manner including metadata such as
definitions, synonyms and causal mechanisms for each concept and support
for a complex polyhierarchical structure.
From this foundation may be extracted any number of traditional tabular
lists, which differ from the foundation in that a single entity may
appear in only one location as in ICD-10. This also permitted the
construction of a range of specialist classifications in which the
detail contained in the foundation is retained but which can be linked
to ICD-11 (14).
THE WORLD NEEDS BETTER HEALTH DATA