Grant: Operating Grant

To ensure global comparability of reported diseases and causes of death across countries and regions, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as the standard diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes. WHO revises the ICD approximately every 10 years to include new diseases (e.g. severe acute respiratory syndrome [SARS]), revise terminology of diseases, and regroup existing symptoms and diseases to reflect medical advancements. In 2012, the WHO developed the ICD-11 Beta (test) version to enhance and expand upon previous ICD versions. The ICD-11 is expected to generate higher quality and more detailed morbidity and mortality data to meet the needs of its many users, such as those working in health services or clinical settings. A key advancement of ICD-11 is its ability for users to code multiple cases and injuries. To test the functionality of ICD-11 in practice, WHO opened the ICD-11 platform to the public, and invited commentary regarding further development and testing. The WHO Collaborating Center (WHO-CC) on Classifications, Terminologies and Standards (CTS) was established to conduct ICD-11 field-testing. The WHO-CC in Calgary (Alberta), led by the investigators for this application, took on this important task and will evaluate ICD-11 to answer the following questions: does ICD-11 generate high quality health data (validity)?; does it add value for improving data quality compared with previous ICD versions (utility)?; and, is easy to use (feasibility)? Fundamentally, this proposed study will provide evidence to increase consistency across ICD versions, and identify improvement paths and methods of reducing errors. The timeliness of this study is opportune, during a period when the WHO requires suggestions and recommendations for ICD-11 revision to generate high quality data that the Calgary team can provide.