Casey Overby Taylor, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Medicine, and a member of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare and the Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins, has received a Genomic Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute. Taylor is one of 12 researchers to receive the award this year.

The Genomic Innovator Award supports pioneering work by early-career genomics investigators who are part of consortia or other team-science efforts. Unlike traditional grants that fund a defined project, this award provides the researcher with flexibility to pursue innovative research within a broad scientific area.

Taylor was recognized for her research in developing and evaluating methods to incorporate genomic results in clinical decision support.

“This award provides funds to achieve my research program goal to maximize the likelihood that unsolicited genomic results (UGR) will be used by healthcare providers to manage risk for poor patient outcomes in a timely manner,” said Taylor.

Given that clinical genomic tests can be initiated outside of the clinical setting (for example, in a research study), from the clinician’s perspective, they can be characterized as “unsolicited,” which brings the challenge of how to determine the value and use of those data in patient care, she explains.

“Clinical decision support (CDS) has great potential to overcome this challenge and to promote the adoption of UGR into routine health care settings,” said Taylor. “With a focus on how to deploy CDS for UGR, we will develop and evaluate frameworks and models to accelerate the adoption of CDS for UGR.”