Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea	MD	02/2001	Medicine
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD	MPH	05/2005	Epidemiology
Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia, PA		06/2008	Internal Medicine
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA		06/2010	Geriatric Medicine
Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA	ScD	05/2014	Epidemiology

Dr. Kim is a geriatrician, researcher, and mentor. He believes we can provide better health care to older people by incorporating frailty into clinical care, research, and population health.

Toward this mission, Dr. Kim founded the Frailty Research Program at the Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife. Funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging, Harvard Catalyst, Medical Foundation, and John A. Hartford Foundation, his research aims to enable clinicians and health care systems to deliver clinical care and population health management tailored to a person’s frailty level.

As a Beeson scholar, Dr. Kim developed a claims-based frailty index algorithm, which allows estimation of the frailty level from administrative claims data such as Medicare data. This algorithm is widely used by epidemiologists and health services researchers to measure frailty on a population scale. He is a member of the Project Advisory Task Force for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services for "Validating and Expanding Claims-Based Algorithms of Frailty and Functional Disability for Value-Based Care and Payment." Dr. Kim’s current research uses this algorithm to evaluate the benefits and harms of drug therapies, surgical procedures, and care models by different levels of frailty.

To translate frailty into clinical practice, Dr. Kim has developed the Senior Health Calculator, an online frailty index calculator, which has been incorporated into the electronic medical records at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He also created the eFrailty.org website, which hosts 15 different frailty assessment tools and web-based calculators, to make frailty assessment accessible to clinicians and researchers. Several quality improvement projects have been conducted to improve use of frailty assessment in the care of older adults. Frailty-guided clinical care has become a core part of the fellowship educational curriculum. As a result, frailty assessment is increasingly used for clinical decision-making and conversations about prognosis with patients and their family.

As a geriatrician, Dr. Kim provides preoperative frailty assessment in medically complex patients undergoing transcatheter aortic valve replacement in the Senior Health Practice at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Dr. Kim has mentored over 40 people in their early career, including recipients of the National Institutes of Health career development awards. He is a recipient of a K24 Mid-career Investigator Award from the National Institute on Aging. He teaches students and trainees at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Geriatrics Medicine Fellowship, and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He lectures on preoperative geriatric assessment and frailty assessment in the Harvard Annual Review of Geriatric Medicine course. His effort in teaching and research was recognized with the Mentor of the Year Award in 2013 and 2020, and the Education of the Year Award in 2022 from the Harvard Geriatric Medicine Fellowship and A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School in 2024.

Dr. Kim is an associate editor of the Journals of Gerontology Medical Sciences and serves on the American Geriatrics Society Research Methods subcommittee and the editorial board of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. His contribution to the field has been recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2017 American Geriatrics Society Junior Investigator of the Year Award, 2023 American Geriatrics Society Thomas and Catherine Yoshikawa Outstanding Scientific Achievement for Clinical Investigation Award, and the election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2024.

• Frailty Measurement in Health Care Database
• Geriatric Pharmacoepidemiology
• Frailty and Outcomes of Health Care Interventions
• Frailty Implementation in Clinical Care