ICPC-2-E: The Electronic Version ICPC-2
Graeme Miller · Family Practice · 2000
We are profoundly disturbed that Okkes et al.1 used the publication in Family Practice of the announcement of the release ICPC-2-E and description of its development to proselytize the dogma that the ICD 10 rubric nomenclature is a satisfactory terminology for general/family practice. This position is by no means universally supported within the WONCA International Classification Committee of which the authors of that paper and the authors of this letter are members. The development pathway of ICPC commenced at the Fifth World General Practice Conference Melbourne in 1972 as a result of a clear perception among primary care researchers that the ICD classification was inherently unsuitable for reporting the activities of general/family practitioners and the problems of their patients. Over the years, the structural differences between the classifications have increased and ICPC-2 has become a very useful and widely used classification for reporting the epidemiology of general/family practice. More recently, the ICPC has been adapted for use in electronic systems for primary clinical coding of data in electronic health records and for secondary coding of data collected in paper-based surveys. This has necessitated the development of systems to classify the language of general/family practitioners reliably according to ICPC.