When a patient goes into a hospital or clinic, whether for a heart attack, stroke, or because they walked into a lamp post (yes, really), a massive amount of data is collected and entered into medical reports. This data, which may include the patient’s condition, any procedures that were performed or medications that were given, and the diagnosis, is then turned into a set of codes.
A team of researchers at the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM) are working closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) to update this coding system, referred to as the International Classification of Disease, or ICD, which upon completion will be adopted across the globe.
The O’Brien Institute was recently re-designated a WHO Collaborating Centre for Classification, Terminology and Standards — in large part due to the central role its researchers have played in the development, testing and transition from ICD-10 to ICD-11. ICD acts as the foundation for the identification of health trends and statistics globally, and this will be its first revision in more than two decades. One of those researchers is Dr. Cathy Eastwood, PhD, who is the primary investigator on the largest ICD-11 trial to date — using full hospital records to test the new coding system.
“Our study is important because it involves real-world coding based on actual hospital visits. This gave us a lot more information on how to use the whole system, and helped identify many gaps,” says Eastwood, who is also a member of the CSM’s Libin Cardiovascular Institute.
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