This section includes mortality and morbidity resources for use in injury surveillance

International Classification of Diseases (ICD) Codes

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a system developed by the World Health Organization to standardizethe classification of diseases, disorders, injuries, and other healthconditions. Originally created to categorize deaths, it has since beenexpanded with more detailed clinical modifications for use with nonfatal data. Because the ICD is updated periodically, each revision improves its accuracy and relevance.

In injury surveillance, ICD codes serve two main purposes:

• Injury diagnosis codes describe both the affected body region(such as the head, leg, or chest) and the nature of the injury (such as a fracture, laceration, solid organ injury, or poisoning).
• External cause of injury codes (E-codes) identify the mechanismof injury (for example, motor vehicle crash, fall, struck by/against,firearm, or poisoning) and the intent (whether unintentional, assault,self-harm, or undetermined).

Injury Reporting Frameworks

ICD Injury Codes and Matrices are frameworks to organize ICD coded injury data into meaningful groupings to facilitate national and international comparability in the presentation of injury statistics.

• Injury Reporting Frameworks, sometimes referred to as matrices, were developed to standardize the reporting of injuries by body region, nature of injury, mechanism, and intent of injury.
• In these Reporting Frameworks, each injury code is placed into one specific grouping or cell of the matrix. This placement is independent of case selection and analysis methods.
• The matrices define groupings of codes, serve as standardized reference points, and are a foundation upon which case selection and injury analysis can be built.