 This is an introduction to medical and health data and metadata and some of the standards for its collection and description. I'm Katherine Brady and I'm the Collection Development Librarian at ANS. Medical and health data encompasses data across the entire spectrum of human disease and well-being. It can be collected in the clinical care and the community healthcare setting. It can be collected in health surveys, longitudinal studies, in clinical trials. It can be generated from test results in diagnostic labs and self-reported patient data. Also includes health billing and claims data and the inputs and outputs of biomedical research. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare operates under a national agreement to collect health data consistent with national metadata standards. They have a nationally agreed approval process for agreeing on those standards and they regularly publish standards to a national online metadata registry called Meteor. Meteor contains structural and administrative metadata including the national minimum data sets which define which metadata elements need to be collected and the national data dictionaries which include the definitions of those metadata elements and also how to classify data according to national and international standards. A very large number of coding and classification systems have been developed over time for healthcare. These are some of the most common ones in use in Australia. Their use helps to promote the consistency in reporting and interpretation of collected medical and health data. Their use incorporates patient care, health services billing, public health statistics, indexing and cataloging of biomedical literature and basic clinical and health services research. Many standards are in use as you can see but widespread adoption has been slow. Current standards tending of PETA and existing vocabularies vary in their coverage and completeness. Many of the classifications overlap. Coding systems lack a precise semantic underpinning and historically many standards have been designed to meet different and specific goals. However there are ongoing efforts both nationally and internationally to converge and harmonize around the use of standards in the medical and health sector. With the advent of electronic health records and the need for subsequent data linkage and data sharing, this effort is gaining momentum. I hope you've learned something about medical and health data standards. Thanks for watching.