Suranga Kasthurirathne, PhD

• Research Scientist, Center for Biomedical Informatics
• Visiting Research Assistant Professor, IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI

Dr. Kasthurirathne is a research scientist whose interests include messaging standards, informatics interventions in resource-constrained environments and the use of data analytics in precision medicine and access to care.

His interest in medical informatics was kindled in 2010 after he volunteered for the OpenMRS project, an open source medical record system platform co-founded by investigators from the Regenstrief institute, and is currently deployed in over 80 countries worldwide. He went on to work on various global health implementation efforts before moving to Indianapolis in 2013 to begin doctoral studies in Health and Biomedical Informatics.

Kasthurirathne brings expertise in various messaging standards, machine learning for healthcare, system architecture and social determinants of health. He is currently securing a patent for a decision model that incorporates patient-centric clinical and behavioral data, as well as aggregate social determinants of health for identifying patients in need of wraparound social services.

“Clinical data repositories can only represent one side of a patient’s story. For a more complete picture, we must explore a wider range of non-clinical data that presents how the patient interacts with their environment, and how this contributes to their health and wellbeing.”