CEHR-GPT: Generating Electronic Health Records with Chronological
  Patient Timelines
Chao Pang Xinzhuo Jiang Nishanth Parameshwar Pavinkurve Krishna S. Kalluri Elise L. Minto Jason Patterson Linying Zhang George Hripcsak Noémie Elhadad Karthik Natarajan
Synthetic Electronic Health Records (EHR) have emerged as a pivotal tool in
advancing healthcare applications and machine learning models, particularly for
researchers without direct access to healthcare data. Although existing
methods, like rule-based approaches and generative adversarial networks (GANs),
generate synthetic data that resembles real-world EHR data, these methods often
use a tabular format, disregarding temporal dependencies in patient histories
and limiting data replication. Recently, there has been a growing interest in
leveraging Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) for EHR data. This enables
applications like disease progression analysis, population estimation,
counterfactual reasoning, and synthetic data generation. In this work, we focus
on synthetic data generation and demonstrate the capability of training a GPT
model using a particular patient representation derived from CEHR-BERT,
enabling us to generate patient sequences that can be seamlessly converted to
the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) data format.