{{ICD10/doc}} is a little more complicated than others, so an explanation of its use is provided below.

The goal of the template is to directly link to the World Health Organization's ICD-10 website. Unfortunately, the design of that website and the design of MediaWiki mean that certain compromises had to be made in the template.

The parameters reagh

The template takes 5 parameters:

{{ICD10|Group|Major|minor|LinkGroup|LinkMajor}}
  • Group - The upper-case Group letter to be displayed in Wikipedia
  • Major - Major group number (2 digits)
  • minor - Minor group number (optional)
  • LinkGroup - lower-case repeat of the Group letter to be presented to the WHO's website
  • LinkMajor - The major coding at the top of webpage in which target Major code exists (may or may not be the same as Major itself - see below)

Capitalization reagh

The ICD10 code R03 is for "Abnormal blood-pressure reading, without diagnosis". The WHO website uses lowercase letters for the chapter, as follows:

Prior to October 2006, the WHO's site would give the correct page, but not the correct anchor if a capital letter was used. Hence the template needed to present lower-case letters to the WHO website but upper-cases letters to the wikipedia page. Although, as of October 2006, the WHO site now permits upper-case letters, there is no guarantee that this will remain the case and so a lower-case version (the LinkGroup second-to-last parameter) should continue to be used.

Determining the page reagh

To add further complexity, compare the following three entries:

From this, we know that there is an additional parameter that needs to be passed, to identify which page the code is on (the LinkGroup parameter). There isn't any predictable relationship, but if you go to the WHO site and search on the condition, and then scroll to the top, you can identify what the first code on the page is, and use that to identify the last parameter.

Examples of use reagh

All of the above may seem confusing, but examples should make it clearer:

  • A03: {{ICD10|A|03||a|00}}: A03.
  • A38: {{ICD10|A|38||a|30}}: A38.
  • A60: {{ICD10|A|60||a|50}}: A60.
  • G08: {{ICD10|G|08||g|00}}: G08.
  • H05.5: {{ICD10|H|05|5|h|00}}: H05.5
  • H67: {{ICD10|H|67||h|00}}: H67.
  • M83.2: {{ICD10|M|83|2|m|80}}: M83.2
  • P04.1: {{ICD10|P|04|1|p|00}}: P04.1
  • R03: {{ICD10|R|03||r|00}}: R03.

Note that there is no period inside "P04.1" when presented by the template. There doesn't appear to be any way to make the period optional. However, the presentation of the ICD code without the period is also commonly found on the web (for example, at this site) so the confusion caused by the omission of the period should be minimal.

Suggestions and feedback are welcome. Despite the limitations of the template, it still should be useful in making the classification of medical articles easier to validate against external sources

See also reagh