Piloting a Collaborative Web-Based System for Testing ICD-11

Background: The 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), for the first time in ICD history, deployed web-based collaboration of experts and ICT tools. To ensure that ICD-11 is working well, it needs to be systematically field tested in different settings, across the world. This will be done by means of a number of experiments. In order to support its implementation, a web-based system (ICDfit) has been designed and developed. The present paper illustrates the current prototype of the system and its technical testing. Methods: The system has been designed according to WHO requirements, and implemented using PHP and MySQL. Then, a preliminary technical test has been designed and run in January 2016, involving 8 users. They had to carry out double coding, that is, coding case summaries with both ICD-10 and ICD-11, and answering quick questions on the coding difficulty. Results: The 8 users coded 632 cases each, spending an average of 163 seconds per case. While we found an issue in the mechanism used to record coding times, no further issues were found. Conclusion: The proposed system seems to be technically adequate for supporting future ICD-11 testing. © 2017 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press.