Fidelity and Privacy of Synthetic Medical Data

Understand

The digitization of medical records ushered in a new era of big data to clinical science, and with it the possibility that data could be shared, to multiply insights beyond what investigators could abstract from paper records.

• The need to share individual-level medical data to accelerate innovation in precision medicine continues to grow, and has never been more urgent, as scientists grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic.
• However, enthusiasm for the use of big data has been tempered by a fully appropriate concern for patient autonomy and privacy.
• That is, the ability to extract private or confidential information about an individual, in practice, renders it difficult to share data, since significant infrastructure and data governance must be established before data can be shared.