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Synthea

Synthea is an Apache-2.0 synthetic patient population simulator that generates realistic but not real patient records in HL7 FHIR, C-CDA, CSV and other formats for healthcare software testing.

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Introduction

Synthea is a synthetic patient population simulator. Its goal is to output synthetic, realistic (but not real) patient data and associated health records in a variety of formats, according to its README.

Features include birth-to-death lifecycle simulation, configuration-based statistics and demographics (defaulting to Massachusetts census data), a modular rule system with drop-in modules and custom Java modules, primary care, emergency and symptom-driven encounters, and conditions, allergies, medications, vaccinations, observations, labs, procedures and care plans. Output formats include HL7 FHIR R4, STU3 and DSTU2, Bulk FHIR ndjson, C-CDA and CSV.

The repository had commits in October 2026.

In the quality loop it supports integration and interoperability testing for healthcare systems.

The source code is at synthetichealth/synthea on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, with about 3,500 stars; the most recent commit was on 21 October 2026.

Features

  1. Lifecycle simulation: Birth to death.
  2. Clinical modules: Conditions, medications, labs and more.
  3. FHIR output: R4, STU3, DSTU2 and Bulk FHIR.
  4. C-CDA and CSV: Other formats.
  5. Configurable demographics: Census-based defaults.

Pros

  1. Domain realism: Clinically structured records.
  2. Free to use: Open source under the Apache-2.0 licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
  3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 21 October 2026.
  4. Community: About 3,500 GitHub stars.

Cons

  1. Healthcare-specific: Not general purpose.
  2. Java runtime: Needs a JDK.
git clone https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea.git && cd synthea
./run_synthea -p 100

Resources:

Pricing

Synthea is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence.

  1. Healthcare software teams needing FHIR test data.
  2. Not a fit outside healthcare.

Conclusion

Synthea is the standard open-source source of synthetic patient data.

On CheckOps, Synthea is filed under the Integration testing stage. Related tools listed here include Synthetic Data Vault (SDV), MOSTLY AI, Faker (Python), Datafaker, Mockaroo and Tonic Structural. Before choosing, compare them on licence, supported languages and platforms, hosting model, and how well each fits your existing CI pipeline. Facts on this page were checked against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026; statements the vendor makes about its own product are marked as vendor claims.

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Alternatives

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