I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at Emory University with more than 20 years of clinical experience in both inpatient and home healthcare settings and am an early stage investigator. Over this time, I became well aware of the challenges posed by rehospitalization at home in heart failure (HF) patients. I began focusing both my academic and research career on improving HF patient outcomes, in particular, rehospitalization. In 2013, I received an NINR F31 to identify rehospitalization predictors in patients with HF who received telehealth in the home healthcare setting after hospital discharge (F31NR014403). With support from my NINR31 Award, I published two papers as part of the preliminary work for the proposed study. Currently, I am conducting a pilot study for symptom management in patients with HF after hospital discharge through my NHLBI-funded K23 study (7K23HL148545-05) and have been receiving training in conducting clinical trial studies. My long-term goal is to develop a home-based symptom management tool by using the K23 study findings and Artificial Intelligence tools and to conduct a multisite clinical trial study.

*Kang, YJ., McHugh, M. D., Chittams, J., & Bowles, K. H. (2016). Utilizing home health care electronic health records for tele-homecare patients with heart failure: A decision tree approach to detect associations with rehospitalizations. Computers, Informatics, Nursing: CIN, 34(4), 175-182. Selected by the publisher as one of the 2016 Spring highlights. PMID: 26848645

Kang, YJ., McHugh, M. D., Chittams, J., & Bowles, K. H. (2017). Risk factors for all-cause rehospitalization among Medicare recipients with heart failure receiving tel-homecare. Telemedicine and e-Health PMID:27689956

Kang, Y., Topaz, M., Dunbar, S., Stehlik, J., Hurdle, J (2021). The utility of nursing notes versus discharge summaries among Medicare patients with heart failure to predict 30-day rehospitalization: a pilot study. J Cardiovasc Nurs. doi: 10.1097/JCN.0000000000000871. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34935742.

Kang, Y., Stoddard, G., Stehlik, J., Stephens, C., Facelli, J., Gouripeddi, R., & Horne, B. D. (2024). Developing 60-Day Readmission Risk Score among Home Healthcare Patients with Heart Failure. Home healthcare now, 42(1), 42–51. https://doi.org/10.1097/NHH.0000000000001226

Shao, M., Kang, Y., Hu, X., Kwak, H.G., Yang, C., Lu, J (2025). Mining Social Determinants of Health for Heart Failure Patient 30-Day Readmission via Large Language Model. preprint arXiv:2502.12158

• 2023-2024 AIM-AHEAD fellowship for 2024
• 2022 Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research Ambassador for 2023
• 2020 Excellence in Research/Scholarship Award Sigma Theta Tau International University of Utah
  Gamma Rho Chapter Salt Lake City, UT
• 2020 Nursing Investigator Award for Research Heart Failure Society of America
  Virtual Annual Scientific meeting