Congratulations to Lori Orlando, MD, who received a distinguished academic promotion in the division of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Orlando was promoted to Full Professor, effective April 1, 2021. Since joining Duke faculty in 2004, she has served a number of critical roles as a faculty member at Duke that integrate her clinical, research and academic interests.
“It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce Dr. Orlando's promotion to Full Professor. As you know, these academic promotions mark faculty members’ scholarly achievements and are a hallmark of professional accomplishment in our school. Faculty appointed to Full Professor have achieved recognition within Duke and at peer institutions as leaders in their fields both nationally and/or internationally.”
- L. Ebony Boulware, MD, MPH – Chief, Duke GIM
Lori Orlando, MD
Professor of Medicine, effective April 1, 2021
Since joining Duke faculty in 2004, Dr. Orlando has served on a number of university programs to enhance the scope of precision and genomic medicine. She is the Director of the Program for Precision Medicine in the Duke Center for Applied Genomics and Precision Medicine. Her goal for this program is to bring together the disparate communities of genomic researchers from across campus and the health system, develop cross-cutting research programs that support each other, reduce duplication of effort, and create an environment that supports thoughtful and highly impactful ideas for research and training. She continues to see patients two days per week in her clinic in the Duke Executive Health Program. Her clinic has been an excellent opportunity for her to translate validated genomic technologies and interventions into the clinical setting and explore their impact. The team-based approach of the clinic and its willingness to continue to adapt and incorporate cutting edge interventions has allowed her to bring together her research and clinic interests and has given the clinic a world-wide reach.
National Recognition
Dr. Orlando has established herself as a leading national and international authority on family health history and risk assessment in clinical care. Her research goals are to use implementation science methodologies to translate validated technologies and interventions into the clinical setting, and more specifically improve risk assessment in primary care so that patients can receive the appropriate screening, prevention, and risk management strategies. She has spent the last 10 years developing and validating a web-based platform that facilitates the collection of a high-quality family health history from patients and automates risk assessment and clinical decision support in real time for both patients and providers to facilitate shared decision making at the point of care.
Publications
Dr. Orlando has 72 published manuscripts, and 5 currently in press. Of these, she is first or senior author on 40 (including high profile journals such as the Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Genetics in Medicine). She continues to contribute to the literature in areas including implementation science, risk assessment, family health history, and informatics. Her recent return to school to obtain the Masters in Management of Clinical Informatics was driven by the desire to leverage informatics technology to facilitate clinical implementation of complex technologies like genomics. The work done for this degree has already led to additional grant funding as part of the NIH’s Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network (eMERGE) and as a co-investigator on the upcoming submission for round 4 of the network. Dr. Orlando wrote a book with two of her colleagues entitled, Managing Health in the Genomic Era: A Guide to Family Health History and Disease Risk that won the Association of American Publishers PROSE award in clinical medicine this year.
Invited Speaker
On the national and international level, Dr. Orlando has been an invited speaker for over 16 national and international meetings, including the keynote address for the Annual International Health Care Summit convened by the Canadian Government to develop their agenda for implementing genomics into clinical settings.
Leadership
Because of Dr. Orlando’s strengths, in 2017 she was awarded a position in the Academic Leadership, Innovation, and Collaborative Engagement (ALICE) program at Duke to develop strong women leaders in medicine. She has had additional leadership training inside and outside of Duke and due to her successes in these areas has been asked to demonstrate the skills she developed in other programs, such as University of North Carolina’s development program.
We look forward to Dr. Orlando’s continuing contributions to science and to the faculty and trainees of Duke University!