ICDcodes

ICDCodes are the standardized identifiers used to classify diseases and other health problems for clinical care, reporting, billing, and health statistics. Maintained by the World Health Organization, the ICD system provides a common language for describing diagnoses across clinics, hospitals, and countries. Many jurisdictions implement national adaptations alongside ICD, such as ICD-10-CM for diagnoses in the United States and ICD-10-PCS for inpatient procedures, while ICD-11 is the latest revision released by WHO and gradually adopted by member states.

The ICD system is hierarchical and organized into chapters by body system and disease type. Codes evolve over revisions; ICD-10 expanded detail from earlier editions, and ICD-11, released in 2018, emphasizes digital compatibility and greater specificity, including post-coordination features that allow combining codes to describe a clinical scenario. In ICD-10, examples include A00 for cholera and E11 for type 2 diabetes mellitus.

ICD codes are used for mortality and morbidity statistics, public health surveillance, reimbursement, and research. They support data aggregation on disease incidence and outcomes, inform health policy, and enable international comparisons. Users include hospitals, clinicians, researchers, insurers, and government agencies. ICD data are accessible through WHO resources and national health authorities, with translations and training materials to support accurate coding.