Launching Canada’s Synthetic Data Network
Dr. Helen Chen, of the School of Public Health Sciences, is leading the University of Waterloo’s role in a new cross-Canada consortium building a Synthetic Data Network (SDN) — an effort to unlock the value of health data while protecting patient privacy.
Canada’s health-care system generates enormous volumes of data that could drive better decisions and outcomes, but privacy requirements make it hard to share and use person-level data at scale. Dr. Chen’s work addresses this gap through synthetic data: computer-generated data that mirror the statistical characteristics of real patient records without containing any information traceable to an individual. As she puts it, synthetic data “preserves the richness of variables while enhancing privacy protection.”
The project begins by focusing on lung cancers, using datasets from the McGill University Health Centre and the Princess Margaret University Health Network to better understand patient populations, care pathways, treatment patterns, and resource use — then testing whether the approach can scale for broader use.
Dr. Chen sees Waterloo’s involvement as a chance to shape national infrastructure, contributing “both the technical architecture and expertise and governance leadership to an emerging national health-data infrastructure.” Alongside collaborators Dr. Anita Layton (Math) and Dr. Sun Sun (NRC), her team is also working with the Canadian Institute for Health Information and the National Research Council of Canada to advance privacy-protecting synthetic data methods.
Her broader goal is to make trustworthy AI in health care possible. “To realize the full benefits of AI in health care, we need approaches that enable organizations to work together without exposing sensitive information,” she says. “Synthetic data creates new opportunities for collaboration, helping researchers develop and test AI solutions that can be trusted and adopted across the health system.”
The SDN was one of 14 groups nationally to receive inaugural funding from the Digital Health Innovation Fund, led by the Terry Fox Research Institute’s Digital Health and Discovery Platform.