Qualitative assessment of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health with respect to the desiderata for controlled medical vocabularies. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • BACKGROUND: The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF), a classification system published in 2001 by the World Health Organization (WHO), provides a common language and framework for describing functional status information (FSI) in health records. METHODS: Informed by ongoing research in coding FSI in patient records, this paper qualitatively assesses the ICF framework with respect to the desiderata for controlled medical vocabularies, an enumerated a list of desirable qualities for controlled medical vocabularies proposed by Cimino [J.J. Cimino, Desiderata for controlled medical vocabularies in the twenty-first century, Meth. Inform. Med. 37 (1998) 394-403]. RESULTS: The ICF satisfies 5 of the 12 desiderata. Five points were not satisfied and two points could not be evaluated. CONCLUSION: The ICF is a rich source of relevant terms, concepts, and relationships, but it was not developed in consideration of requirements for formal terminologies. Therefore, it could serve as a base from which to develop a formal terminology of functioning and disability. This assessment is a key next step in the development of the ICF as a sensitive, universal measure of functional status.

publication date

  • August 24, 2005

Research

keywords

  • Disability Evaluation
  • Health Status Indicators
  • International Classification of Diseases
  • Medical Records Systems, Computerized
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Terminology as Topic
  • Vocabulary, Controlled

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 33645390175

PubMed ID

  • 16122973

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 75

issue

  • 5