ONC Announces Health IT Winners of Synthetic Health Data Challenge

ONC has announced $100,000 in total awards to six winners of the Synthetic Health Data Challenge for health IT tools.

Synthetic health data generation tools create artificial datasets that mimic real-world data. Researchers, health IT developers, and informaticians leverage synthetic health data to test new ideas until access to secure and real clinical data is available.

Reliable synthetic data generation tools protect patient privacy by supporting appropriate stewardship practices in which real patient health information is only accessed and used when necessary.

"The availability of realistic, synthetic data is a vital part of supporting iterative testing models and early stage research and product development," Steve Posnack, deputy national coordinator for health information technology, said in a public statement.

"We received a lot of inspired submissions that took this work to the next level and hope that each winner can serve as a foundation to further enhance tools that create synthetic data,” Posnack continued.

The challenge was conducted under ONC's Synthetic Health Data Generation to Accelerate Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) project supported by HHS' Office of the Secretary Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund.

Challenge winners developed and tested innovative and novel solutions that are set to enhance the capabilities of Synthea, an open-source synthetic health data generator.

Coming in first place was a solution called Code Rx which aims to improve medication diversification.

ONC chose two solutions for second-place. The Virtual Generalist solution modeled comorbidities in Synthea, and another tool made social determinant of health-based enhancements to conditional transition logic.

Three solutions came in third place. One tool highlighted the need for realistic synthetic health data development environments.

Another solution leveraged synthetic health data to predict the probabilities of underlying conditions.  

The third solution in third place used synthetic data to conduct spatiotemporal data analysis of the opioid epidemic in Illinois.

ONC granted first place teams $40,000. Each team in second place received $15,000, and third place winners earned $10,000 apiece.