Refinements of the ICF Linking Rules to strengthen their potential for establishing comparability of health information

Purpose The content of and methods for collecting health information often vary across settings and challenge the comparability of health information across time, individuals or populations. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) contains an exhaustive set of categories of information which constitutes a unified and consistent language of human functioning suitable as a reference for comparing health information. Methods and results In two earlier papers, we have proposed rules for linking existing health information to the ICF. Further refinements to these existing ICF Linking Rules are presented in this paper to enhance the transparency of the linking process. The…