Modern Information Architecture in ICD11: a Dynamic, Interactive, and Ontological Context

International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is considered as the most successful product among various activities performed by World Health Organization. However, ICD has faced many challenges due to dynamic environment of needs. The main purpose of this study was to identify ‎ICD challenges and structure of ICD 11 life cycle through a review study of the published papers. Literature Review: A review study was adopted as the methodology of this paper. Data were collected by search strategy in the following databases: NLM, SCIENCEDIRECT, WHO‏‎, and ICD 11 related sites. The findings showed that ICD was used in many countries some of which found ICD an insufficient tool for ‎the level ‎of details needed for clinical and ‎administrative uses. In addition, little consideration was given to adaptability of codes and mapping between the ICD-9 to ICD-10 codes. Therefore, WHO initiated ‎a new dynamic architechture based on ‎semantic web application and employed a four stage workflow ‎‎engine for collecting proposals. This architecture has applied a Semantic Wiki as well as a four stage peer review to provide a three layer ontological structure. ICD11is at the experimental stage and it is predicated that it would have a significant role in the interaction and interoperability of different terminologies leading to the development of Electronic Health Records.