ICPC-2 training tool for Ukrainian primary care providers

The online training simulator will help Ukrainian healthcare professionals learn how to work with the International Classification of Primary Care, version 2 or ICPC-2, which is the most widely used classification instrument in clinical settings. The functionality of this tool allows using it for any clinical case that can occur in general practice and family medicine.

The ICPC-2 online simulator is intended to be used by both healthcare professionals for self-learning purposes and educational institutions or professional associations for organization of specialized trainings.

Everyone should start by reading the user guide, which provides key information about the principles of the ICPC-2 structure and work, and contains links to online training simulator and the form for improvement proposals.

The simulator offers users to study several examples of episodes of care, which illustrate the algorithm of its work when dealing with patients in clinical settings.

The functionality of the ICPC-2 online simulator includes the option for entering new patient encounter/visit data. This allows trainers to create any type of situational assignments, and trained healthcare professionals – to master the ICPC-2 coding in practice.

The ICPC-2 basic categories include a patient-doctor encounter and a patient visit, that form an episode of care. ICPC-2 allows for the classification of the patient’s reason for encounter (RFE), the health problems/diagnosis, and health care interventions, which are very useful for structuring the episode of care data.

ICPC-2 has a biaxial structure and consists of 17 chapters, each divided into 7 components dealing with symptoms and complaints, diagnostic, screening and preventive procedures, medication, treatment and procedures, test results, administrative records, referrals and other reasons for encounter and diseases.

On January 4, 2018 the Ministry of Health of Ukraine approved Order No.13 "On the Use of the Ukrainian Version of the ICPC-2", considering the ICPC-2 implementation to be a necessary step towards improving the patient registration procedure and the medical records system at the primary care level.

The use of ICPC-2 will allow Ukrainian primary care providers (family doctors, therapeutists and pediatricians) to focus on the needs of their patients, instead of spending a significant part of their working time on paper work and statistical data collection.

Electronic medical records will serve to encode reasons for the patient’s reason for encounter in each particular case, which is a significant step towards developing a truly patient-oriented healthcare system.