This system is designed to promote international comparability in the collection, processing, classification, and presentation of these statistics. The ICD is published by the WHO and used worldwide for morbidity and mortality statistics, reimbursement systems, and automated decision support in health care. Thus, major categories are designed to include a set of similar diseases. This system is designed to map health conditions to corresponding generic categories together with specific variations, assigning for these a designated code, up to six characters long.

The ICD is originally designed as a health care classification system, providing a system of diagnostic codes for classifying diseases, including nuanced classifications of a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or disease. The ICD is maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations System. The International Classification of Diseases ( ICD) is a globally used diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes. For other uses, see ICD (disambiguation).

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