What are the Read Codes?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The Read Codes were initially developed by a general practitioner, Dr James Read from Loughborough, in the early 1980s and rapidly gained acceptance by general practitioners as a popular and useful mechanism for storing structured information about patients in individual, patient-based records, which were beginning to become popular in a few general practices at the time. This short article aims to explain the past and future development of the coding system in the National Health Service as a whole.