Day 2

Welcome to Day 2 of ICD iCamp at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Our participants are back, ready to start the hands-on work of creating the alpha-draft of the ICD-11.

The iCampers come from a variety of backgrounds and are filling many roles. We have WHO staff members, Managing Editors for Topic Advisory Groups, or "TAGs", Classification Experts, and Informatics Experts.

The ICD-11 will be a collaboratively authored project, and many people will be submitting proposals for content, much like wikipedia. Unlike Wiki, however, the ICD will be peer reviewed with the TAGs serving as the editorial boards. The Managing Editor for each TAG will have a huge job. They will collect, synthesize, and present the information for each proposal, and they are responsible for ensuring that the correct team of reviewers is selected. The managing editor is responsible for the timely management of the information in the iCAT platform.

WHO appreciates the many WHO Collaborating Centres who sent us their Classification Experts. These individuals are top specialists in the international clinical modifications, and they are contributing to the creation of the classification hierarchy of the ICD-11, known as linearization, to be used within the iCAT tool.

Our iCamp Informatics experts include programmers, modelers, and expert professionals in workflow and social computing.

All of these participants are contributing to the refinement and population of the "content model" for each diagnostic classification term. This content model is the most important difference between the ICD-10 and the ICD-11. Based on the operational definition of a disease, the ICD-11 content model was created to represent the descriptive characteristics of a ICD category in a digital way. Transforming clinical characteristics into computerized parameters will help users to classify the diseases in a new and better way.

It was a long day, as our experts worked on a few examples each, learning the system, and transferring their considerable knowledge into the iCAT's brain.

Throughout the day, our Informatics Experts were on hand to modify the system, to better suit the clinical applications the ICD-11 will have to fit. After hours of work, our participants had a chance to present their populated examples, to further enable discussion on how to make this the best platform yet.

Of course, all of this work must still be reviewed, and the process for this must be both reasonable and rigorous, but it's been a long day and our iCampers have been working hard, so we'll start learning about that process tomorrow.