Synthea
MITRE's open-source synthetic patient generator for realistic, privacy-safe health records.
About
Synthea is an open-source synthetic patient population simulator originally built by the MITRE Corporation and now driven by a community of developers, academics, and clinicians. It generates full longitudinal patient records, conditions, medications, procedures, and encounters, exported in FHIR and C-CDA formats, so health IT teams can develop and test against realistic data with zero privacy risk. A companion project, SyntheticMass, serves a synthetic population of Massachusetts over an API.
The generator is a Java/Gradle application run from the command line: pick a state or city, set a population size and seed, and it writes patient bundles to ./output. Disease and life-event logic lives in modules the community can extend and peer-review. With about 3,400 GitHub stars, an Apache 2.0 license, and commits within days of this writing, it remains the default source of synthetic FHIR data for health AI research and EHR testing.
What it can do
- Full-lifecycle synthetic patient records
- FHIR R4 and C-CDA export formats
- Configurable geography, demography, and disease modules
- Deterministic seeding for reproducible populations
- Community-reviewed clinical modules
Setup
- Clone https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea (requires Java and Gradle).
- Run
./run_synthea -p 100 Massachusettsto generate 100 patients. - Find FHIR/C-CDA bundles in ./output.
- Tune modules or seeds in synthea.properties for custom populations.
Prerequisites
Java 17+ and Gradle; disk space for generated bundles.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 3,397 GitHub stars (GitHub API), Apache-2.0, pushed 2026-10-14, not archived; official site synthetichealth.github.io/synthea verified live; MITRE origin documented. Strengths: de-facto standard synthetic FHIR data, active maintenance, permissive license. Docked for: (1) Java/Gradle stack is heavyweight vs Python-native tools; (2) US-centric disease modules need localization elsewhere. License: Apache-2.0.
★ 3,397 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · 3,397 GitHub stars, Apache-2.0, pushed 2026-10-14, not archived (GitHub API, synthetichealth/synthea)
- · MITRE origin documented; community-driven modules
- · synthetichealth.github.io/synthea verified live (HTTP 200)
- · FHIR R4 and C-CDA export; deterministic seeding
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.