If the hospitals do not use the ICD standard, the data systems would be fragmented and very difficult to integrate and so to interpret country disease prevalence and health status. If we need all disconnected systems to communicate and talk to each other, very expensive and handy middleware will be needed.
For health information exchange (HIE), we need standardization and interoperability between information systems. So, utilization of agree-on disease coding standards like ICD standard or SNOMED CT are required for disease classification and reliable health data exchange.
