The Preservation Health Check (PHC) project, undertaken as a joint effort by Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and OCLC Research, aims to evaluate the usefulness of the preservation metadata created and maintained by operational repositories for assessing basic preservation properties. The PHC project seeks to develop an implementable logic to support preservation health checks of this kind, and to test this logic against the store of preservation metadata maintained by an operational preservation repository. Preservation metadata is often viewed as "contingency information" that is stored and maintained in the event of future need. The project goal was to explore the opportunities for using preservation metadata to support threat assessment exercises. The scope of the analysis is confined to establishing a general approach for using preservation metadata to support threat assessment, and to evaluating the utility of PREMIS preservation metadata as an evidence base for such assessments. The remainder of this paper provides background on the problem addressed by the PHC project, the approach for operationalizing the concept of a preservation health check, some preliminary findings, and next steps.