Generating Synthea Data
Generates synthetic but realistic patient records (FHIR R4 bundles, C-CDA documents...
Install
npx skills add maziyarpanahi/openmed --skill generating-synthea-data -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- maziyarpanahi/openmed5.8k
- Category
- Testing
- Updated
- 4d ago
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Context cost
- Lightabout 1,421 tokens
- Runs scripts
- No, instructions only
What it does
Generates synthetic but realistic patient records (FHIR R4 bundles, C-CDA documents, CSV) with MITRE Synthea for development, CI fixtures, demos, and leakage-gate test sets, zero real PHI. Use when you need safe, shareable test data for an OpenMed pipeline, reproducible fixtures for tests, or a held-out set for de-identification leakage gates, instead of touching real clinical data. Synthea output feeds the FHIR/C-CDA ingestion skills and openmed.eval. Trigger keywords: Synthea, synthetic data, fake patients, test fixtures, demo data, FHIR bundle generator, synthetic EHR, no PHI.
Generating Synthetic Patient Data with Synthea
You cannot develop, test, or demo a clinical NLP pipeline on real PHI without a mountain of governance, and you shouldn't have to. Synthea (MITRE's Synthetic Patient Population Simulator) generates statistically realistic, fully synthetic patients: complete longitudinal records as FHIR R4 bundles, C-CDA documents, and flat CSV, with zero real-PHI risk. Use it for OpenMed dev fixtures, CI, demos, and, importantly, as held-out test sets for de-identification leakage gates, where you need known-synthetic "PHI" to measure recall.
When to use
- Building or demoing an OpenMed ingestion pipeline (FHIR, C-CDA) and need shareable input that is safe to commit and pass around.
- Creating deterministic CI fixtures so tests don't depend on protected data.
- Producing a leakage-gate test corpus: synthetic notes with known fake
identifiers, so you can score whether
openmed.deidentifyremoved them all. - Teaching/onboarding without a data-use agreement.
Quick start
Synthea is a Java tool. Generate a small population in multiple formats:
# Requires Java 11+. Clone and build once.
git clone https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea && cd synthea
./gradlew build -x test
# Generate 50 patients in Massachusetts as FHIR R4 + C-CDA + CSV.
./run_synthea -p 50 Massachusetts \
--exporter.fhir.export=true \
--exporter.ccda.export=true \
--exporter.csv.export=true \
--exporter.baseDirectory=./output
# Reproducible runs: fix the seed so fixtures are stable across CI.
./run_synthea -s 12345 -p 20 --exporter.baseDirectory=./fixtures
Output lands under output/fhir/, output/ccda/, and output/csv/. Feed the
FHIR bundles to parsing-... skills, or hand narrative straight to OpenMed:
import json, openmed
