This community innovation has been accepted at the 2026 DHIS2 Annual Conference and will be included a session.
Integrating ICD-11 in DHIS2 using Interop Service
High quality and timely inpatient morbidity and mortality data are critical for effective health system planning, disease surveillance, and evidence based policy development. In many low and middle income countries, inpatient reporting remains fragmented, largely manual, and dependent on outdated disease classification methods, limiting interoperability and the value of clinical data for national decision making. In Zimbabwe, inpatient data are captured through a DHIS2 Tracker based Case Based Surveillance (CBS) system, while national reporting is managed through the DHIS2 Aggregate based National Health Information System (NHIS). The lack of automated integration between these systems has constrained the production of the national inpatient T9 report and delayed access to key morbidity and mortality insights. This work presents an ICD 11 enabled architecture for integrating CBS with NHIS using Zimbabwe’s existing interoperability infrastructure. Instead of embedding the ICD 11 toolkit within individual applications, the solution leverages the Open Health Information Mediator (OpenHIM) to provide centralized, reusable ICD 11 coding services. This design promotes interoperability, reduces duplication of coding logic, and mitigates performance risks associated with managing large ICD 11 code sets within DHIS2. Within CBS, ICD 10 option sets are replaced with ICD 11 search and validation services accessed through OpenHIM, enabling real time diagnosis and cause of death coding. Enhanced Tracker configurations introduce mandatory Medical Certificate of Cause of Death (BD12) fields and program rules to enforce logical consistency. Case based records are aggregated into T9 indicators using DHIS2 analytics, with anonymized datasets automatically transferred to NHIS to support national reporting, dashboards, and the annual health profile. This approach strengthens data quality, reduces manual reporting, and offers a scalable model for operationalizing ICD 11 in DHIS2
Primary Author: Lynnette Musekiwa
Keywords:
Integration, ICD11, DHIS2 core, Inpatient morbidity, Mortality data, DHIS2, Case-Based Surveillance (CBS), National Health Information System (NHIS), OpenHIM, Interoperability, T9 reporting
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