Dr. Kim one of the nation's most impactful geriatrician-researchers, and an accomplished mentor. He researech has proved that 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 renowned Frailty Research Program at the Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife. His research enables 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 the claims-based frailty index, which allows estimation of the frailty level from administrative claims data such as Medicare data. This landmark achievement has transformed frailty research as the algorithm is widely used by epidemiologists and health services researchers to measure frailty on a population scale. Dr. Kim’s current research uses this index 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. This tool is being used for nationwide for quality improvement projects to improve frailty assessment in routine care and for assessment of older patients before transcatheter aortic valve replacement. 

Dr. Kim has mentored over 40 scholars in their early career. He teaches students and trainees at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Geriatrics Medicine Fellowship, and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. 

Dr. Kim is an associate editor of the Journals of Gerontology Medical Sciences and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. He was a member of the American Geriatrics Society Research Methods subcommittee in 2014-2023. His contribution to the field has been recognized with several awards, including the 2023 American Geriatrics Society Thomas and Catherine Yoshikawa Outstanding Scientific Achievement for Clinical Investigation Award.  This annual award recognizes the most impactful clinical scientist in the AGS.