Welcome to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s (AIHW’s) 9th Health Classifications Update.
This update includes news from the World Health Organization Family of International Classifications (WHO-FIC) annual meetings held in Geneva in October 2025. There were approximately 160 people from many countries and collaborating centres which allowed a wide and varied discussion of many topics.
Australia made a bid, subject to funding, to host the WHO-FIC Network 2026 annual meeting in Sydney in October. The WHO-FIC Network supported our bid. If we are successful in funding this bid, then it will be a great opportunity to enhance collaboration between the WHO-FIC Network and SNOMED International, which is having its Expo in Sydney at the same time. Here at the AIHW we are continuing the work to understand the costs and benefits of, and likely path for, implementing ICD-11 in various use cases.
In addition to this,
- The Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA) has engaged a consultancy to develop a business case for replacing ICD-10-AM with ICD-11, with a final report expected in June 2026.
- The Australian ICD-11 Task Force (AITF) is developing the business case for a wider implementation which will include information from the IHACPA work.
AIHW, IHACPA and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have continued engaging with other countries that are also embarking on their ICD-11 implementation journey – the questions and issues we are all facing are similar, even where our systems are different, so sharing knowledge during this period will be crucial. More information about this is discussed later in this update.
Preparations will be starting soon for the WHO-FIC mid-year meetings which will (mostly) be virtual meetings, and the Australian Collaborating Centre (ACC) secretariat has the big job of finding funding for the WHO-FIC annual meetings (wish them luck folks there is a lot of moving parts to juggle when organising international meetings).
Michael Frost
Senior Executive, Primary, Community Care & Information Standards Group and Centre Head, WHO Collaborating Centre for the Family of International Classifications Australia
Australian updates
AITF activities
The Australian Health Classifications Advisory Committee (AHCAC) established the AITF in 2022 to develop a multi‑year Roadmap of activities to inform a decision on implementing ICD‑11 across a range of Australian use cases.
The key deliverable of this Roadmap is a business case for government on ICD‑11 adoption. This will incorporate the findings of the IHACPA business case, due for completion in June 2026; the AITF business case will be finalised thereafter.
The Task Force includes representatives from all states and territories, the ABS, IHACPA, the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC), the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing (DHDA), the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA), and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC).
What happened in the second half of 2025?
The AIHW has been consulting national agencies, state and territory health departments and other identified stakeholders. As part of these consultations, potential demonstration projects were explored that could provide evidence of the value of ICD-11 for the ICD-11 business case.
Is there a topic that you are particularly interested in seeing how ICD-11 would improve health data capture and reporting?
It can be as big or small as you can want, from 100 cases to a 1000 or more!
We are looking for projects that you can complete by June 2026.
Contact the classifications team at the AIHW at [email protected] to discuss what you can do to help inform the ICD-11 business case.
Email us at [email protected].
ACC international engagement
The ACC engages regularly with other WHO-FIC Collaborating Centres to share implementation planning experiences and lessons.
In the second half of 2025, the ACC met with international counterparts from the following countries to find out about work that they have done on ICD-11 planning and lessons learnt that could be applicable in Australian context.
The ACC will continue to engage with these and other countries as we learn of their progression in ICD-11 implementation and data usage.
| Country/ Organisation | Plans |
|---|---|
| Since 2023, Malaysia has transitioned its national health data system and some of its hospital information systems to ICD-11 and is now reporting nationally using ICD-11. Malaysia’s challenges include managing legacy systems, vendor dependencies, and outdated infrastructure. Malaysia is planning to visit the ACC in July 2026. |
| The German ICD-11 implementation strategy has an emphasis on documentation-based approaches using SNOMED CT and ICD-11. The German centre noted that mapping between the two will not be sufficient. User-driven data, iterative testing and demonstration projects in new domains are planned to provide valuable lessons. |
| The Netherlands national vision was to link and harmonise core standards for health information exchange. There is ongoing debate on using classifications vs. terminologies for different use cases; there is a push for “semantic unification” and using the right tool for the right purpose. Implementation of ICD-11 is estimated to be by 2031. |
| Calgary outlined that it is developing ICD-11 indicators to update the Elixhauser and Charlson comorbidity measures, which have shown substantially better performance in prediction of adverse events in a dataset. The ACSQHC shared its experiences with data for patient quality and safety (Q&S) measuring and reporting in Australia, and some of the challenges such as having state-based repositories for Q&S and not a national one. |
Nordic CC | There is a Nordic ICD-11 Task Force which Sweden and Norway are participating in. Sweden is expecting implementation for mortality in 2027 and admitted care in 2028, with the translation into Swedish having been completed. Norway has not made a decision on when to implement in admitted care but is estimating 2028-29. |
| Canada is working on the governance of transition to get a national mechanism for making health data decisions rather than one for each province. A Pan-Canadian Task Force is being formed with membership from all provinces, federal government agencies, as well as some non-government organisations that are data and/or research based. CIHI is reviewing Canadian health system performance indicators which use ICD coded data but also looking at the legacy of what it produces and opportunities to enhance its casemix and health system performance measures. Statistics Canada is awaiting the upgrade of Iris to ICD-11 to enable it to move to ICD-11 for mortality. The aim for implementation is to have mortality and morbidity implement around the same time. |
| The UK has been considering its ICD-11 implementation approach and has decided not to go with a “Big Bang” approach where all of NHS would move across at the same time, especially due to recent significant change to the organisation. An approach similar to Malaysia may be used (i.e., a phased roll out, using mappings in the interim). |
| A delegation came to Australia in December 2025 and held in person meetings with IHACPA in Sydney and AIHW in Canberra (with ABS virtually attending the AIHW meeting). Japan plans to implement ICD-11 for mortality by 2027. Its challenges are workforce limitations, translation of ICD-11 and associated tools, quality of clinical documentation, and establishing standardised use of extension codes. Japan is exploring the use of AI assisted coding and automated coding to address workforce and resource constraints, while noting the need for human involvement for validation and quality control. |
