Chapter 22. ICD Codes
The real title of the “International Classification of Diseases” or “ICD” is the “International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems,” although nobody uses the full honorific in the medical trades. This is the “Dewey Decimal for disease,” in that it is a hierarchical scheme to encode diseases, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or disease. Every health condition can be assigned to a unique category and given a code up to six characters long. Such categories usually include a set of similar diseases. The format of the code is ‘[:alpha:][:digit:][:digit:]-[:alpha:][:digit:][:digit:]’ in the ANSI/ISO Standard SIMILAR TO predicate syntax. ...
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