Synthea: An approach, method, and software mechanism for generating synthetic patients and the synthetic electronic health care record.

Objective: Our objective is to create a source of synthetic electronic health records that is readily available; suited to industrial, innovation, research, and educational uses; and free of legal, privacy, security, and intellectual property restrictions.

Materials And Methods: We developed Synthea, an open-source software package that simulates the lifespans of synthetic patients, modeling the 10 most frequent reasons for primary care encounters and the 10 chronic conditions with the highest morbidity in the United States.

Results: Synthea adheres to a previously developed conceptual framework, scales via open-source deployment on the Internet, and may be extended with additional disease and treatment modules developed by its user community.