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Spotting new trends is one of my favorite parts of my job. But I like it even more when multiple trends come together in a transformative wave. That is exactly what is happening in health technology right now, as the sector is not only benefiting from the rise of open data, but also from the democratization of data analytics and privacy-preserving synthetic data. Let’s investigate. — Anna

Data for health technology builders

When I heard synthetic healthcare data is starting up syntax release datasets with realistic, but false, patient data for free, caught my eye. Not because it released open data, not because it shared synthetic data, and not because it’s a health technology company, but because it did all those things at once.

You wouldn’t be wrong to think that open data is cool in and of itself. For example, I was delighted to hear earlier this week about the launch of BigScience’s large language model, BLOOM, a free and open alternative to OpenAI’s GPT-3. But it is expected that BLOOM will mainly be used by researchers. In contrast, the datasets made available by Syntegra and Tuva Health are intended for health technology startups.