“A new challenge within the Department of Health and Human Services aims to explore advanced capabilities for a synthetic health data engine to strengthen how patients make smart and informed health care decisions.”
“HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) launched the competition, called the Synthetic Health Data Challenge, this week to support the data infrastructure for the research it is doing around patient-centered outcomes.”
“Improving patient-centered outcomes with research is critical to providing high-quality health care, ONC said, but gathering quality data can be difficult because of the cost of data and privacy concerns and restrictions around patient consent. Synthetic health data can support quality of care research, and the agency is looking to develop its synthetic health data engine, Synthea, to accelerate it.”
“’Synthea is an open-source synthetic patient generator that models the medical history of synthetic patients,’ ONC said. ‘The resulting data are free from cost, privacy and security restrictions and have the potential to support a variety of academia, research, industry and government initiatives…'”
“The competition is centered around developing tools that can support the validation of the synthetic data and find novel uses of this generated data for researchers and health IT developers. These two goals shape the two entry categories of the challenge…”
“ONC will select up to six winners with prizes ranging from $10,000 to $50,000, with a cap of $100,000 for the total award amount…” Read the full article here.
Source: ONC Seeks Synthetic Health Data Engine to Support Researchers – By Melissa Harris, January 22, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
