Assigning appropriate and comprehensive diagnosis for scientific report

The use of currently available guidelines such as the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) and its clinical modification to assign a principal diagnosis to a patient who has multiple principal diagnoses appears unreliable. This is because these guidelines are complex and uses criteria that are highly subjective. Even when one main diagnosis is selected, the comprehensive list of other diseases that the patient has is often not reported such that the overall clinical condition of the patient is obscured. To address these issues, we have proposed: (i) a simple, potentially reliable and stepwise guide that can be used to assign the single most appropriate main principal diagnosis to each patient and illustrated this with case reports (ii) how to simultaneously report the main and other diagnoses in a scientific paper. It is hoped that our proposal (named NJ model for easy referencing) will help standardize how diagnosis is assigned to patients.