Interoperable synthetic health data with SyntHIR to enable the
  development of CDSS tools
Pavitra Chauhan Mohsen Gamal Saad Askar Bjørn Fjukstad Lars Ailo Bongo Edvard Pedersen
There is a great opportunity to use high-quality patient journals and health
registers to develop machine learning-based Clinical Decision Support Systems
(CDSS). To implement a CDSS tool in a clinical workflow, there is a need to
integrate, validate and test this tool on the Electronic Health Record (EHR)
systems used to store and manage patient data. However, it is often not
possible to get the necessary access to an EHR system due to legal compliance.
We propose an architecture for generating and using synthetic EHR data for CDSS
tool development. The architecture is implemented in a system called SyntHIR.
The SyntHIR system uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)
standards for data interoperability, the Gretel framework for generating
synthetic data, the Microsoft Azure FHIR server as the FHIR-based EHR system
and SMART on FHIR framework for tool transportability. We demonstrate the
usefulness of SyntHIR by developing a machine learning-based CDSS tool using
data from the Norwegian Patient Register (NPR) and Norwegian Patient
Prescriptions (NorPD). We demonstrate the development of the tool on the
SyntHIR system and then lift it to the Open DIPS environment. In conclusion,
SyntHIR provides a generic architecture for CDSS tool development using
synthetic FHIR data and a testing environment before implementing it in a
clinical setting. However, there is scope for improvement in terms of the
quality of the synthetic data generated. The code is open source and available
at https://github.com/potter-coder89/SyntHIR.git.