The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have addressed the successful use of metadata tagging with regards to patient health data. This is in response to the push for metadata standards from way back in 2010 by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

This interesting information was found on iHealth Beat in their article, “HHS, VA Demonstrate Exchange of Metadata-Tagged Health Data.” The goal is to promote health data exchange while increasing the security of information.

HHS and VA’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has demonstrated the use of metadata tagging with a system they developed as part of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health’s Data Segmentation for Privacy Initiative (Modern Healthcare,  9/17). The demonstration showed how sensitive patient data can be tagged to advise the next caregiver of its sensitivity.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.