Dae Hyun Kim, MD, MPH, ScD, Receives 2024 Harvard Medical School Mentoring Award
Dr. Kim has mentored over 40 people in their early careers.
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Associate Scientist
Dae Hyun Kim, MD, MPH, ScD, is a recipient of Harvard Medical School’s 2024 A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Awards.
Dr. Kim is an associate scientist at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a geriatrician at the Division of Gerontology in the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and an instructor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The Excellence in Mentoring Awards were established to recognize the value of quality mentoring relationships and their impact on professional development and career advancement in basic/clinical medicine, research, teaching, and administration. The first Excellence in Mentoring Award was established in 1995 and was renamed in 1997 to honor the memory of Dr. A. Clifford Barger. Dr. Barger devoted his career to bringing out the best in those who studied, trained, and worked at Harvard Medical School.
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 Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research. 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 who want 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 a website called “eFrailty.org” to make commonly used frailty calculators available to clinicians and researchers. As a result, frailty assessment is increasingly used for clinical decision-making and conversations about prognosis with patients and their families.
As a geriatrician, Dr. Kim provides preoperative comprehensive geriatric 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 careers, including recipients of the National Institutes of Health career development awards. 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 frailty assessment in the Harvard Annual Review of Geriatric Medicine course.
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.
About Hebrew SeniorLife
Hebrew SeniorLife, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is a national senior services leader uniquely dedicated to rethinking, researching, and redefining the possibilities of aging. Hebrew SeniorLife cares for more than 4,500 seniors a day across seven campuses throughout Greater Boston. Locations include: Hebrew Rehabilitation Center-Boston and Hebrew Rehabilitation Center-NewBridge in Dedham; NewBridge on the Charles, Dedham; Orchard Cove, Canton; Simon C. Fireman Community, Randolph; Center Communities of Brookline, Brookline; Jack Satter House, Revere, and Leyland Community, Boston. Founded in 1903, Hebrew SeniorLife also conducts influential research into aging at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, which has a portfolio of more than $98 million, making it one of the largest gerontological research facilities in the U.S. in a clinical setting. It also trains more than 500 geriatric care providers each year. For more information about Hebrew SeniorLife, visit our website or follow us on our blog, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn.
