Balancing Privacy and Innovation a VAE Framework Aor Synthetic Healthcare Data Generation

Volume 16, Number 3

Balancing Privacy and Innovation a VAE Framework Aor Synthetic Healthcare Data Generation

Authors

Saritha Kondapally, Senior Member IEEE, USA

Abstract

The growing reliance on data-driven innovation in healthcare often collides with the critical need to protect patient privacy, creating a tension between progress and compliance. This study bridges that gap by introducing a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based framework to generate synthetic healthcare data that mirrors real-world datasets while ensuring privacy preservation. By leveraging synthetic EHRs created using the Synthea tool, the framework achieves a balance between statistical fidelity and data utility, enabling secure sharing and collaboration without compromising sensitive information. Through rigorous evaluation of distributional alignment and predictive performance, this work demonstrates the promise of synthetic data in unlocking the full potential of AI-driven healthcare solutions, offering a path to innovation that respects both privacy and progress.

Keywords

Privacy-Preserving Data Generation, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Synthetic Healthcare Data, Generative AI, AI, Healthcare, Electronic Health Record (EHRs), Machine Learning, FHIR.