ICD-11: A catalyst for advancing patient safety surveillance globally
- PMID: 36894925
- PMCID: PMC9999485
- DOI: 10.1186/s12911-023-02134-2
ICD-11: A catalyst for advancing patient safety surveillance globally
Abstract
The World Health Organization's (WHO) international classification of disease version 11 (ICD-11) contains several features which enable improved classification of patient safety events. We have identified three suggestions to facilitate adoption of ICD-11 from the patient safety perspective. One, health system leaders at national, regional, and local levels should incorporate ICD-11 into all approaches to monitor patient safety. This will allow them to take advantage of the innovative patient safety classification methods embedded in ICD-11 to overcome several limitations related to existing patient safety surveillance methods. Two, application developers should incorporate ICD-11 into software solutions. This will accelerate adoption and utility of software-enabled clinical and administrative workflows relevant to patient safety management. This is enabled as a result of the ICD-11 application programming interface (or API) developed by the WHO. Third, health system leaders should adopt the ICD-11 using a continuous improvement framework. This will help leaders at national, regional and local levels to take advantage of specific existing initiatives which will be strengthened by ICD-11, including peer review comparisons, clinician engagement, and alignment of front-line safety efforts with post marketing surveillance of medical technologies. While the investment to adopt ICD-11 will be considerable, these will be offset by reducing the ongoing costs related to a lack of accurate routine information.
Keywords: ICD-11; International classification of diseases; Patient safety; Surveillance.
© 2023. The Author(s).
Conflict of interest statement
The authors (AJF, HAP, CGC, WAG) do not have competing interests to declare.