How to Access Synthetic Data in the VA

“Emerging opportunities from this wealth of digital data come at the steep cost of individual privacy. With the breadth of data sharing amongst consumers, data brokers, technological platforms, etc., the risk to patient privacy has increased.Synthetic data is data that mimics realistic patterns but does not correspond to real data records. If data can be generated that reflects the patterns in clinical EHR data without any identifiable correlation to the actual data records used in their generation, this would have significant benefits for data privacy in the research and clinical contexts.”