Synthetic Patient Data

When we're developing software systems, it's useful to fill them with data to illustrate and test how they work. For example, to show that the online store we are developing works as expected, we fill it up with products that we can purchase. Likewise, when we're developing electronic health record (EHR) systems, it's useful to fill them up with patient data.

While we can use real products to fill online stores, we cannot fill the EHR system we are developing with real patient data. Therefore, we need tools that generate realistic, but not real, patient data. The data for every type of patient needs to make sense. For example, a normal blood pressure for a child is far lower than for an adult, and it does not make sense for the average female patients to have vasectomies in their patient histories.

Synthea is a great project that generates realistic patient data and associated health records in lots of different formats, such as FHIR. By default, the patients in Synthea are from Massachusetts in the US, but there is a synthea-international repository with configuration files for international locations.

synthea-international already had Norwegian hospitals, but unfortunately it only had support for English and Finnish names. Last week we organized our hackathon, d:hack, at DIPS, so I decided to add support for Norwegian names.

When you now run synthea-international to generate Norwegian resources (See synthea-international for more information), you get patients with Norwegian names. For example, to generate five patients from Bodø, Norway, you can run

./run_synthea -p 5 Nordland Bodø

This command will generate five FHIR Bundles that contain the complete patient histories for each patient. Here's an excerpt from the synthetic patient history of a patient Sophie40 Utgård849 who was treated by Dr. Amar285 Sønsteby262 at Nordlandssykehuset in Bodø:

...
 {
   "resource": {
     "resourceType": "Encounter",
     "status": "finished",
     "class": {
       "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v3-ActCode",
       "code": "AMB"
     },
     "type": [
       {
         "coding": [
           {
             "system": "http://snomed.info/sct",
             "code": "410620009",
             "display": "Well child visit (procedure)"
           }
         ]
       }
     ],
     "subject": {
       "display": "Sophie40 Utgård849"
     },
     "participant": [
       {
         "type": [
           {
             "coding": [
               {
                 "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v3-ParticipationType",
                 "code": "PPRF",
                 "display": "primary performer"
               }
             ]
           }
         ],
         "individual": {
           "display": "Dr. Amar285 Sønsteby262"
         }
       }
     ],
     "serviceProvider": {
       "display": "Nordlandsykehuset"
     }
   },
 },
...

From these FHIR bundles we can now populate our EHR with realistic Norwegian patients!