Improving trustworthiness for the codes of International Classification of Diseases 11th version and reducing hospital readmissions in order to improve healthcare services

Happy New Year greetings to all our readers. This first issue of 2016 by the International Journal for Quality in Health Care (IJQHC) presents two interesting editor's choices focused on topics including International Classification of Diseases 11th version and on the promising effect of hospital readmissions reduction program in US hospitals. Since the World Health Organization (WHO) is working towards a revised disease classification system that has an enhanced ability to capture health concepts in a manner that reflects current scientific evidence and also compatible with contemporary information systems. In this paper, Southern et al. [1] propose recommendations to the WHO by the ICD revision's Quality and Safety Topic Advisory Group (Q&S TAG) for a new conceptual approach to capturing healthcare-related harms and injuries in ICD-coded data. The Q&S TAG has grouped causes of healthcare-related harm and injuries into four categories. The authors expect that this new framework for coding healthcare-related harm has great potential to enhance the clinical details of adverse event descriptions, and the reliability of coded health data.