Evaluation of Diagnoses According to ICD-10 and ICPC-2 in Family Medicine Practice: A Retrospective Study

Abstract

Introduction: After the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, briefly ICD (ICD-10), the World Health Organization (WHO) accepted the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-2) as a reason for encounter classification of diagnoses in primary healthcare services. The study aimed to assess the degree of alignment between diagnoses encoded with the ICD-10 and, those coded using the ICPC-2.

Materials and Methods: We collected the diagnoses coded with the ICD-10 of 42,782 patients registered in the Uludağ University Family Health Center, Bursa, Turkey. The ICD-10 codes were converted to ICPC-2 codes with the program in the family medicine information registration system. Diagnoses in the database were analyzed. p values less than 0.05 were considered significant in the study. Analyses were made with the SPSS 25.0 package program.

Results: Of the 42,782 diagnoses with codes in ICD-10, a total of 218 diagnoses (0.51%) did not have an equivalent in ICPC-2. On the other hand, it was determined that a total of 463 diagnoses (1.08%) in ICD-10 had 2 or more codes in ICPC-2.

Conclusion: According to our results in family medicine practice, the equivalents of ICD-10 and ICPC-2 codes were different in number and percentage. It is ideal for individual health and research that the diagnosis codes in family medicine are the same as the codes in other secondary and tertiary care clinics. Since health requires holisticity, we recommend that both classifications be integrated and revised to be globally understandable and provide complementary coding in different clinical applications.