A Novel Method to Create Realistic Synthetic Medication Data

A team of 6 pharmacists from CodeRx created an open-source tool called Medication Diversification Tool (MDT). MDT is designed to improve Synthea’s ability to create realistic synthetic medication data. Synthea is an open-source synthetic patient generator that creates synthetic medical data. Synthetic data are vital to research and innovation in healthcare because privacy restrictions on healthcare data limit access to researchers and developers. Prior to our work, Synthea was generating inaccurate medication profiles. MDT is a python package that combines data from publicly available sources and generates JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files that can be integrated with Synthea. When used in conjunction with MDT, Synthea creates more realistic medication profiles. The team validated the improvements by comparing synthetic populations