Dae Hyun Kim, MD, MPH, ScD

Dr. Kim is a geriatrician, researcher, and mentor, and serves as Associate Director of the Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife. He is committed to improving the care of older adults by incorporating frailty into clinical care, research, and population health.

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

As a Beeson scholar, Dr. Kim developed the claims-based frailty index (CFI), an algorithm that estimates frailty using administrative claims data such as Medicare data. The CFI is now widely used by epidemiologists and health services researchers to measure frailty at a population scale. Dr. Kim served on the Project Advisory Task Force for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the initiative "Validating and Expanding Claims-Based Algorithms of Frailty and Functional Disability for Value-Based Care and Payment." Using the CFI, his research evaluates how the benefits and harms of medications, surgical procedures, and care models vary by frailty level.

To translate frailty into clinical practice, Dr. Kim has developed the Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment-Based Frailty Index (also known as the Senior Health Calculator), an online tool that has been incorporated into the electronic medical records at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He also created eFrailty.org, a web-based platform hosting 15 validated frailty assessment tools and calculators, to make frailty assessment accessible to clinicians and researchers. These efforts have supported multiple quality improvement initiatives, integrated frailty assessment into fellowship education, and increased the use of frailty-informed decision-making and prognostic discussions with patients and families.

Clinically, Dr. Kim provides preoperative frailty assessment for medically complex older adults undergoing transcatheter aortic valve replacement in the Senior Health Practice at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Dr. Kim has mentored more than 50 early-career investigators, including multiple recipients of National Institutes of Health career development awards. He is the recipient of a K24 Mid-career Investigator Award from the National Institute on Aging. He teaches and mentors students and trainees at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Geriatrics Medicine Fellowship, and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and lectures regularly on frailty assessment in the Harvard Annual Review of Geriatric Medicine course. His contributions to education and mentorship have been recognized with Mentor of the Year Awards (2013, 2020), and the Educator of the Year Award (2022) from the Harvard Geriatric Medicine Fellowship, and the A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School (2024).

Dr. Kim serves as an Associate Editor for the Journals of Gerontology Medical Sciences, is a member of the American Geriatrics Society Research Methods subcommittee, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. His contribution to the field has been recognized with several 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.