Harlan Krumholz

Harlan M. Krumholz is an American cardiologist. He is the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. Krumholz's research is aimed at determining optimal clinical strategies and identifying opportunities for improvement in the prevention, treatment and outcome of cardiovascular disease

Early life and education
Krumholz earned his Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Yale University in 1980 and his medical degree from Harvard University in 1985. As an undergraduate at Yale University, Krumholz was granted an opportunity to complete an internship at the North Carolina Office of Rural Health & Community. Following this, he completed his medical fellowship at Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard Medical School and residency at the University of California, San Francisco.

Career
Krumholz joined the faculty at the Yale University School of Medicine in 1992, where he then directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program. While serving in this role, he convinced Medicare to give him access to detailed patient data from heart doctors in Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa and Wisconsin in order to create a database of 16,000 patients. Using this data, he concluded that half the patients hospitalized for heart failure returned to the hospital within six months. He also found in 2004 that although angioplasty was successful in reopening clogged arteries, only 33% of patients were getting angioplasty when needed. He also served as an editor for the NEJM journal Watch Cardiology since 1995 and Editor-in-Chief since 2000.

In 2005, Krumholz was appointed the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine and published The Expert Guide to Beating Heart Disease: What You Absolutely Must Know through HarperResource. In recognition of his "research aimed at determining optimal clinical strategies and identifying opportunities for improvement in the prevention, treatment and outcome of cardiovascular disease," Krumholz was elected a Member of the Institute of Medicine.

While serving as the director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale New Haven Hospital, Krumholz co-established HUGO, a cloud-based personal health record. The aim of HUGO was to allow patients to access their health records electronically across multiple healthcare systems and synchronize those records with a research database. In 2017, Krumholz was named to serve on Ned Lamont's inaugural governing committee for the National Evaluation System for Health Technology Coordinating Center (NEST) and his transition committees for health care.

Krumholz continued his research into heart attacks by tracking Medicare patients across the United States. He found that hospitalizations for heart attacks have declined by 38% since 1990 and the mortality rate for heart attacks was at only 12%. In 2018, Krumholz and Erica Spatz were co-recipients of a $1.2 million, four-year grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to develop a wrist-worn, cuffless blood pressure monitoring system. He was recognized for his efforts by the American Heart Association with the 2018 Clinical Research Prize. The following year, he collaborated with Chenxi Huang to develop a new mathematical model that could predict the risk of acute kidney injury.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in North America, Krumholz co-founded a website called medRxiv which was intended to be used for sharing preliminary medical research. Using a $2 million award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the website allows scientists to share new discoveries and research findings in the clinical and health sciences to accelerate possible treatments.

Personal life
Krumholz is married to Leslie Krumholz, co-founder of The Guilford Fund for Education and CEO of GoodStreets.