German Adaptations of ICD-10

The introduction of the ICD-10, published by WHO 1992-94 in English and by DIMDI 1994/95 in German, is a very slow process. Some states introduced ICD-10 for the preparation of statistics of mortality, but only few use it for morbidity. ICD-9 is in Germany only in hospitals still in use. Much effort was put into the improvement of the official ICD-10 and the development of additional aids for more simple and better encoding of diagnoses. Thus a revision especially for ambulatory health care (ICD-10-SGBV with the incorporated ICD-10-Basisschlüssel) and a collection of German terms and expressions of diagnoses that are not at all part of the official ICD-10 (ICD-10-Diagnosenthesaurus) were published. Three years ago a conversion table ICD-9/-10 was developed which can now be harmonised with WHO's Translator. The experiences with all these instruments are satisfying. The development of methods for automatic encoding of free-text phrases of diagnoses has now been started.