A chapter for traditional medicine and a code for every clinical detail: the disease classification of the WHO

Background

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, known as the ICD, is the World Health Organization's standard for recording disease and cause of death. It has been the basis for comparable statistics on mortality and morbidity between places and over time for more than a century. Its eleventh revision, ICD-11, was adopted by the 72nd World Health Assembly and replaces ICD-10. The classification works inside the WHO's constitutional mandate to establish international nomenclatures, and alongside the WHO Nomenclature regulations. ICD-coded data is used on death certificates, in hospital records, in cancer registries and in reporting antimicrobial resistance. ICD-11 is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 IGO license and is available in ten languages, with more under translation. For the first time the classification carries a supplementary chapter on traditional medicine conditions, meant only for optional dual coding. That chapter is not intended for mortality reporting, and a record using it must also carry a category from chapters 1-24 of the ICD.