Day 5

Welcome back to the start of the second week of ICD iCamp at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. All of our iCampers have made it back from Mont Blanc, and are refreshed and ready to start another productive week. Today's topic was workflows.

After the focused and specific review done last week, our Managing Editors and Classification Experts had the opportunity today to reexamine how each of the components we have covered so far fits into the workflows in general. This is a chance to organize the big picture together with the small details, and understand what all of the combined efforts will accomplish.

In order to do this, it is necessary to revisit the life of a content proposal from start to finish. In the beginning, a content proposal for ICD-11 will be created by a collaborative author. This author might be a government supported content expert, a member of a classification group, or a private individual such as a clinician or an academic member of a research institution. The beauty of a collaborative authoring tool like the iCAT is that it allows the creation of the ICD-11 to draw on the expertise of anyone at anytime, anywhere in the world.

After a proposal is created, the Managing Editor will serve as "postmaster", ensuring that each proposal is complete and correctly formatted, as well as thoroughly supported, before forwarding the content proposal on to the specifically chosen team of independent peer reviewers. It is also the job of the Managing Editor to filter out or address those proposals which do not fulfill the necessary criteria.

Those content proposals which receive the appropriate percentage of approvals by the peer reviewers will be passed along to the Topic Advisory Group for further review. The TAG is responsible for further evaluation of the content proposal and the supporting information provided. Each content proposal which reaches this stage may also require the review of other, parallel, TAGs, if the content of the proposal overlaps between multiple TAG areas.

Each proposal which meets the exacting requirements of the TAG or TAGs will be passed along for further evaluation by the Revision Steering Group. This process will ensure that all of the information to be included in the ICD-11 meets the highest possible standards, which in turn ensures the best possible resource for users in the field.

But we’re not done; all of this is merely the alpha draft, and we’ll have more to do before we can be sure that the ICD-11 is perfect and perfectly functional. Come back tomorrow for more of ICD iCamp.