Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Modern health research and development faces a dilemma. On the one hand, there is more data than ever — in electronic health records, in lab research, in public datasets, and on the internet — from which to extract potentially transformative scientific insights and to use as the basis for developing breakthrough health care technologies. On the other hand, using this data entails various risks: threats to patient privacy, skewed samples and approaches to analysis that can perpetuate demographic and other biases, and uneven access to data about rare conditions and small patient subgroups. Generating synthetic data has emerged as one promising approach to potentially navigating these challenges.

Comments

© 2024 The Author(s). Hastings Center Report published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Hastings Center. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Originally published as Daniel Susser, Daniel S. Schiff, Sara Gerke, Laura Y. Cabrera, I. Glenn Cohen, Megan Doerr, Jordan Harrod, Kristin Kostick-Quenet, Jasmine McNealy, Michelle N. Meyer, W. Nicholson Price II, and Jennifer K. Wagner, “ Synthetic Health Data: Real Ethical Promise and Peril,” Hastings Center Report 54, no. 5 (2024): 8–13. DOI: 10.1002/hast.4911

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