International Classification of Primary Care, second edition

WHO has accepted ICPC-2 within the WHO FIC mainly as a reason for encounter classification, and users may use it as a classification for primary care or general practice wherever applicable; see also www.who.int/classifications/icd/adaptations/icpc2/en/

ICPC-2 classifies patient data and clinical activity in the domains of General/Family Practice and primary care, taking into account the frequency distribution of problems seen in these domains. It allows classification of the patient’s reason for encounter (RFE), the problems/diagnosis managed, interventions, and the ordering of these data in an episode of care structure

It has a biaxial structure and consists of 17 chapters, each divided into 7 components dealing with symptoms and complaints (comp. 1), diagnostic, screening and preventive procedures (comp. 2), medication, treatment and procedures (comp. 3), test results (comp. 4), administrative (comp. 5), referrals and other reasons for encounter (comp. 6) and diseases (comp. 7).

First published as ICPC 1987 by Oxford University Press (OUP). Current version: ICPC-2-Revised, also published by OUP. See the ICPC-2 pager for the presentation of ICPC-2 on two pages. The ICPC-2 has been translated into 20 languages.

There is a bilingual ICPC2-ICD10 thesaurus in English and Dutch - a diagnostic Terminology for semi-automatic Double Coding in Electronic Patient Records.

update May 2009