News: ICD-11 officially released
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially released ICD-10 2022, the official 11th revision of the International Classification of Disease (ICD) coding set. According to the release, “all Member States are encouraged to follow their commitment to move on to ICD-11 documented with their approval of ICD-11 at the 72nd meeting of the World Health Assembly in 2019 and use the most current version of ICD for recording and reporting mortality and morbidity statistics both nationally and internationally.” This means that at a minimum, ICD-11 is expected to be used for mortality reporting.
Since its release for testing in 2016, WHO has taken into account 900 proposals for input from early adopter countries and scientific groups. Key updates for ICD-11 include:
- Rare disease coding
- Support for perinatal and maternal coding
- Grade and stage coding for cancers
- Clinical descriptions and diagnostic requirements for mental health
According to ICD10Monitor, ICD-11 is “entirely digital, with integrated application programming interface (API) tools to facilitate implementation.”
In an ICD-11 Fact Sheet from WHO, countries who have not used a previous version of ICD and have a simple information system may need one to two years for implementation. Conversely, highly sophisticated information systems where previous versions of ICD are in use may require four to five years to transition to ICD-11. The United States, currently using ICD-10, is included in that latter group.
Editor’s note: The WHO release of ICD-11 can be found here. The ICD-11 Fact Sheet can be found here.