Case Study

Synthetic patient EHR data for advanced analytics with Erasmus MC

About the client

Erasmus Medical Center (Erasmus MC or EMC) is the leading hospital based in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and is one of the most authoritative scientific University Medical Centers in Europe. The hospital is the largest of the eight university medical centers in the Netherlands, both in terms of turnover and number of beds. Erasmus MC ranks #1 of the top European institution in clinical medicine and #20 in the world, according to the Times Higher Education rankings.

The situation

The Smart Health Tech Center (SHTC) of Erasmus MC aims at the integration, development, testing and validation of technologies for health, such as advanced AI-based technologies (e.g. IoT, MedIoT, Active and Assisted Living Technologies), robotics technologies, sensor and monitoring technologies.

  • They assist in providing physical and digital access to resources to Start-ups, SMEs, knowledge institutions enabling them to test, validate or experiment their products and services in clinical- and hospital- or patient-home settings.
  • They offer support to research partners in finding the right setting and experts, clinical expertise, expertise in AI and robotics, data and training for health care in the Erasmus MC.
  • They assist staff to spearhead innovations and create an entrepreneurial and solution oriented creative culture within the Erasmus MC.

Through these services, the SHTC facilitates the rapid development, testing and implementation of new co-created ideas to reimagine health care and care delivery, such as synthetic data.

The solution

The Smart Health Tech Center (SHTC) of Erasmus MC recently organized the official kick-off for synthetic data. At Erasmus MC, it will be possible to request synthetic data through the Research Suite. Would you like to use a synthetic dataset? Or do you want more information about the possibilities? Please get in touch with the Research Suite via the Research Support Portal or by emailing them.

The benefits

Analytics with synthetic data

AI is used to model synthetic data in such a way that the statistical patterns, relationships, and characteristics are preserved to such an extent that the generated synthetic data can even be used for analytics. Especially in the model development phase, Erasmus MC will prefer using synthetic data and always challenge data users with the question: “Why use real data when you can use synthetic data?”

Enlarge data for testing purposes (upsampling)

By making smart use of generative AI in the creation of synthetic data, it is also possible to enlarge and simulate datasets, especially when there is insufficient data (data scarcity)

Get started faster

By using synthetic data as an alternative to real data, Erasmus MC can reduce risk assessments and similar time-consuming processes. Synthetic Data enables Erasmus MC to unlock data. Additionally, Erasmus MC can accelerate data access requests. Accordingly, Erasmus MC builds a strong foundation to accelerate data-driven innovation.

Enlarge data for testing purposes

Data augmentation techniques can be used to generate and simulate data that can be used for testing purposes.

Erasmus MC logo

Organization: Erasmus Medical Centre

Location: The Netherlands

Industry: Healthcare

Size: 16,000+ employees

Use case: Analytics, Test Data

Target data: Patient data, data from the electronic health record system

Website: https://www.erasmusmc.nl

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