Multilingual approach to ICD10: on the need for a source reference database.

The distribution of ICD10 is of concern for thousand of developers in numerous countries. The absence of some basic features to facilitate the transfer and consequently to augment the quality of the delivered version is a constant characteristic. Errors, ambiguities, missing terms, unrecognised attributes are quite common, despite the efforts of some national centres doing their best to fill this gap. For other countries and languages, where such centres do not exist or do not have sufficient resources, this problem is even stronger. A reference ICD database is clearly a need today. The following features are to be made available out of an ICD database: exact count of terms, whether they are systematic, include, exclude or daggers and asterisks pairs, eventually at chapter level; exact count of notes, references and indirect exclusions; recommended structure of relational tables for ICD representation; basic structure of the classification at any level of detail. These features are somewhat language dependant and should be repeated for each one. This paper demonstrates the benefits of publishing such ICD reference information in order to improve the future ICD tools to be developed in numerous countries.