ICPC-3 to Become Openly Licensed
ICPC-3 to Become Openly Licensed: A Milestone for Primary Care Worldwide
International Classification of Primary Care - Third Revision (ICPC-3) is a clinical classification system designed for use in primary care. It is used daily by general practitioners and family doctors to record patients’ reasons for encounter, symptoms, diagnoses, and care processes, supporting patient-centred and continuous care.
ICPC is routinely used in high-performing primary care systems in many countries across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For decades, ICPC has been a core professional tool for family doctors and a distinctive contribution from primary care to international health information systems.
WONCA (the World Organisation of Family Doctors) is the licensor of ICPC. WONCA has now decided to make ICPC-3 openly available under a Creative Commons licence, representing a historic change in licensing policy and arguably the most important decision regarding ICPC in recent decades. This decision was taken to remove barriers to adoption, implementation, and innovation worldwide. By making ICPC-3 openly accessible, WONCA aims to strengthen primary care documentation, research, education, and digital health development globally, in line with its mission to support strong, equitable, and person-centred primary care systems.
The WONCA International Classification Committee (WICC), WONCA’s oldest working group, was established in 1972, the same year as WONCA itself. Its work emerged from a shared concern among general practitioners that international classifications were increasingly shaped by super-specialisation and reductionism. Primary care required a different approach: one that reflects the eco-bio-psycho-social understanding of patients and the holistic perspective of family medicine.
Over the decades, WICC has developed and maintained several classification tools, often in collaboration with organisations such as WHO and NAPCRG. While medicine has evolved continuously, the last 20 years have been marked by rapid digitalisation. ICPC-3 is the most comprehensive classification specifically designed for primary care use in digital environments.
Photo: WICC Meeting in Newcastle, October 2024..
About ICPC-3
ICPC-3 has been developed in a future-oriented way, with extensive inclusion terms and synonyms that allow it to function not only as a classification, but also as a practical thesaurus for primary care. It supports modern primary care delivery, including attention to functioning and social participation, interprofessional teamwork, and task-shifting between health professionals. ICPC-3 is also designed to interoperate with major international classifications and terminologies such as ICD-11, ICF, and SNOMED CT, supporting semantic interoperability across health information systems.
For family doctors, terminology and classification are not neutral technical tools. How health problems are named, grouped, and recorded influences clinical reasoning, statistics, dashboards, and ultimately patient care. Decisions about the level of detail (granularity) in registration affect risks of under- and overdiagnosis and the appropriateness of treatment. These decisions must remain anchored in the discipline of family medicine and cannot be delegated without reflection.
ICPC-3 classifies health problems, symptoms, and reasons for encounter typically managed in primary care, and is particularly suited for episode-of-care-oriented documentation. Its level of detail has been carefully calibrated to balance clinical usefulness and interoperability: detailed enough to support meaningful primary care data, yet general enough to align with broader terminologies and classifications used at national and international levels.
WICC and WONCA will provide guidance and support for translations and implementations of ICPC-3, which will follow defined principles to ensure consistency, quality, and sustainability as the classification is adopted and expanded worldwide.
By Gustavo Gusso (Brazil), Chair,
Øystein Hetlevik (Norway), Deputy Chair,
WONCA International Classification Committee (WICC)
Links
Launch of ICPC-3 - Message from Dr Donald Li, WONCA President (December 2020)
Interview with WICC chair Gustavo Gusso (2024)