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