What does the future hold?

ICD-11

The implementation of ICD-11 is most exciting thing that has happened in the world of Clinical Coding for nearly 30 years. It will mean that no longer will Clinical Coders have the classification in book form but it will be used entirely on web. Instead of having 1000's of codes this new classification will have over a million which will enable the service to assign codes to diseases and occurences that have not been possible in ICD-10. However, the change to ICD-11 is still a few years off, but this will allow us in the service to prepare and plan for the change. To ensure that our datasets are able to accept the new code format and that the clinical coders themselves have the training they need to be able to use the new classification accurately.

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

The World Health Organisations (WHO) states that on their website that "ICD-11 is:

• The global standard for health data, clinical documentation, and statistical aggregation
• Multiple uses, including primary care,
• Scientifically up-to-date
• Designed for the 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"

Additional Reading

Why don't you have a go yourself using the ICD-11 Browser