Tom Lombardo is responsible for all medical and world news coverage, continuing medical education, content licensing,and health-care industry coverage. Mr. Lombardo has been a journalist for 25 years and has specialized in medical journalism for the past 10 years. During that decade, Mr. Lombardo pioneered four innovative medical and health information systems.
While a senior partner at Whittle Communications, the guerilla media company run by education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle, Mr. Lombardo was the creative force behind the conceptual development and launch of Medical News Network, an interactive television system that featured daily news and CME for clinicians. At its launch in 1993, the network was the first interactive television system in the world. Mr. Lombardo also pioneered the quarter-hour video CME course for Medical News Network, working with such institutions as Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, the University of Southern California, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, the University of Alabama-Birmingham to produce 133 interactive CME courses.
Mr. Lombardo moved from Whittle Communications to become a founding member of a multidisciplinary team appointed by Times-Mirror Inc.'s Mosby Year-Book Division to create a comprehensive web site for physicians. The site, launched in July 1996 as MD Consult (https://www.mdconsult.com), brought together for the first time ever the resources of three of the world's largest medical publishing companies to produce the first "full-text" electronic reference service for physicians.
Mr. Lombardo was the Executive Editor behind the development and launch of a consumer health site, Sapient Health Network. Available on the World Wide Web, the network became the first of its kind to build communities of patients with chronic illnesses. Sapient Health Network, funded by two of the largest health care capital firms in the world, also developed proprietary patient profiling software.
Mr. Lombardo also has been the Executive Editor of Physician's Weekly. Physicians regularly peruse copies of Physician's Weekly, which reliably delivers quick information on research and policy news, from its place in its attractive case hanging on the walls of the doctors' lounges, libraries, and medical records rooms of U.S. hospitals.
Mr. Lombardo has personally interviewed several hundred physicians during his decade of innovation in medical multimedia, and has come away with a deep respect for the job that they do, their depth of knowledge, and their commitment to patient care. Many physicians whom Mr. Lombardo has interviewed have a number-one complaint: getting blind-sided by patient queries sparked by oftentimes inaccurate or incomplete mass media reports on medical research. Mr. Lombardo has dedicated his career to helping clinicians clearly answer those questions.