Raajitha Muthyala is a graduate student pursuing an MS in Health Informatics. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad (JNTUH), completed in 2022. During her undergraduate studies, Muthyala was involved in drug research and development, specifically preparing Maraviroc (an anti-viral drug) effervescent floating tablet to increase bioavailability by prolonging retention in the stomach.
At the Purkayastha lab, Raajitha is developing clinical decision support modules for the OpenMRS Electronic Medical Record system. Her work aims to enable the use of these modules in low-resource settings, providing primary care physicians with recommendations for tests and procedures at a quality comparable to specialists. She is also working with big data technologies such as Spark and Data Lakes to leverage data from multi-million patients in building machine learning models within OpenMRS. Additionally, Raajitha is pursuing a natural language project focused on text entity extraction to enhance explainability, which can help analyze patient trajectories for end-stage liver disease and social determinants of health.
Prior to her master’s program, Raajitha worked as a junior research scientist (apprenticeship) in the Analytical Laboratory at the R&D unit of Viatris. There, she analyzed various drug samples using HPLC-MS, generated spectrograph reports, provided insights, and offered feedback to the chemical laboratory. This experience with data inspired her to pursue technology-related courses relevant to healthcare, leading to her enrollment in Health Informatics. Earlier in her career, Raajitha also worked with Amazon as a customer service specialist.
Raajitha’s research interests include Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) applications in healthcare data, as well as data analytics.