Deep dive on generating synthetic data for Healthcare

This post discusses the use of synthetic data to protect individual privacy while sharing electronic health records (EHR) among hospitals and healthcare organizations. Synthetic data is artificially manufactured rather than generated by real-world events, making it a promising technology for sharing knowledge in healthcare without compromising patient privacy. The article delves into training Gretel's open-source synthetic data library to generate EHR that protect individual privacy while capturing key statistical insights from the original source data. It provides an example dataset of de-identified emergency room discharge summaries and demonstrates how to use Gretel's ML-generated synthetic data to maintain both per-column distributions and field correlations in the training set, ensuring that individual health records are not memorized or replayed. The post concludes by expressing excitement about the potential of synthetic datasets for enabling safe data sharing with differential privacy guarantees in healthcare.