The cardiologist building digital tools to help colleagues stay on top of new research

Visit the website of cardiologist Ruey Hu, and you can scroll through his prolific scientific articles neatly arranged into 11 sections by study type, peruse a folder of medical education resources, and browse links to a couple of hand-coded tools. More curiously, there’s also a tab labeled, “Composing.”

There live three sheets of music for works titled “Gauntlet,” “Topsody,” and “Renewal.” The notes dance across the staff, creating sections devoted to different instruments. And in the top right corner, the composer’s name, the same one on all of those scientific papers: Jiun-Ruey Hu (his full name).

Hu, part of the 2023 class of STAT Wunderkinds, is a Renaissance man. He plays four instruments: piano, violin, clarinet and cello. And in his undergraduate years at Princeton, he was part of an East Asian a cappella group that performed songs in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He loves “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” among other musicals. He ice skates and does tae kwon do.

The 31-year-old Hu’s wide-ranging interests also prompted him to teach himself nine computer programming languages as a child. Now, having earned a Masters of Public Health, a medical degree, and prestigious cardiology fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine, he’s blending his expertises to create, by hand, a suite of novel technologies to help doctors decide on patient treatment plans with the most up-to-date medical advice.

Born in Malaysia and raised in Toronto on library books, Hu initially wanted to be a computer programmer before shifting career paths toward medicine, drawn by a sense of altruism and the mysteries of the human heart. “There’s just so many levers you can pull to help a patient really get to the place they need to be,” he said. One can change how heart muscle stretches before a contraction, alter the strength of a heartbeat, or widen constricted blood vessels. The organ at the center of all things can be analyzed electrically, and ultrasonically, and acoustically. There’s so much to work with.

Cardiology also offered Hu something “no other specialty, at least within internal medicine” has: a voluminous portfolio of clinical trials and evidence to ground treatment decisions in. The heart and its rivers and tributaries are deeply studied, which gives Hu’s field a steady foundation that other specialties are still clamoring for. But a heavy influx of scientific information also has its downsides, Hu realized — inspiring him to work on a fix.

Over a million new medical research papers appear on PubMed every year, and doctors don’t have time to slog through all of them. That’s part of the reason national societies write and update clinical practice guidelines that condense the existing evidence into key recommendations. However, these guidelines can often swell to 200 or 300 pages, still impractically long for busy physicians to read in detail.

Hu’s digital tools are meant to solve that issue, emulating what he does as a part of a cardiology consulting group at Yale. People from all over the hospital, including surgeons, emergency physicians and other providers, call Hu and his colleagues in to interpret what certain symptoms or test results mean — and what to do about it.

With GDMT for Everyone, Hu has built a tool for guideline-directed medical therapy in cases of heart failure. The idea is that providers can type in some parameters related to a patient’s medical history and, based on that, get an algorithmically concocted recommendation that aligns with the guidelines issued by national medical associations. The heart attack tool can be used once the telltale protein troponin is detected in the bloodstream.

Another platform built by Hu — called Stressing Wisely — can help physicians decide when a stress test (and what kind) is appropriate for a patient with chest pain.

Both tools have been recognized by national societies, and the GDMT website is used by people in 67 countries, said Michael G. Nanna, assistant professor of medicine in Yale’s cardiovascular medicine department. “The scope and depth of Ruey’s impact exceeds what one would expect of any fellow,” Nanna wrote in a letter recommending Hu as a 2023 STAT Wunderkind.

“That’s the kind of thing that really does have an impact and makes a difference,” said Stephen Juraschek, a clinical investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who met Hu while he was getting his master’s degree at Johns Hopkins. The two have collaborated on a series of projects, including some narrative reviews and a couple of papers published in high-impact medical journals. “He’s just a really thorough, comprehensive and phenomenal person to work with.”

Advising physicians-in-training is another one of Hu’s delights. He loves talking to people, writing letters of recommendation, and editing personal statements and applications. His peers love him back: In 2021, he was voted by the Yale medical students as the top fellow educator across all subspecialties in internal medicine. In 2022, Yale medicine residents elected him Fellow of the Year across all internal medicine subspecialties, making Hu the first person to earn both titles.

Paradoxically, that’s part of the reason he says he has “no ambitions to be a department chair or med school dean” — too much HR, and not enough time to focus on research and mentorship.

An administrative post might separate him from the things he loves about medicine and research, including education. “The greatest compliment ever,” to Hu, is when he explains something so clearly to a patient that they ask if he’ll accept their spouse or family member as a patient, too.

The digital consult tools are also an educational effort, meant to simplify physicians’ lives while teaching them how to handle certain clinical situations. Hu has been creating them with a team of collaborators from different institutions, each of them devoting days off to fine-tuning the platforms. So far, they have been goodwill projects, since they fall in a funding gray area, somewhere between medical education and research. Achieving self-sufficiency is tricky.

When Hu built the GDMT tool, which won a national innovation award from the American Heart Association in 2022, he said pharmaceutical companies approached him about sponsoring or acquiring it. At first, he thought an infusion of industry cash would enable him to keep developing GDMT for Everyone. But drugmakers’ interest wasn’t without strings attached.

“They wanted to modify the algorithm to recommend this drug more. There was a drug that recently came on the market a year ago and they wanted to insert that. And I just felt like, no, the national societies don’t recommend this medication yet. It would be improper to insert this in my algorithm and recommend this,” Hu told STAT. He realized the tools needed to remain financially independent; otherwise, they would never earn the trust of providers and patients.

In many ways, Hu has remained true to his adolescent self, the kid who decided to learn an extra instrument so he could create a piece of orchestral music and tackle another programming language so he could build a video game. His motivation was pure curiosity. Next year, he will move to a new place, Los Angeles, for a fellowship in interventional cardiology at Cedars-Sinai.

That same curiosity drives Hu today — always with the ultimate goal of making life better for other people, whether his work takes place by the bedside, in a room full of peers, or behind a laptop screen.

Ruey Hu is part of the 2023 class of STAT Wunderkinds. Read more about this year’s rising young stars in science and medicine.