I’m Aware That I’m Rare: Tom Krohn (192)

The phaware® interview

Tom Krohn is the Chief Development Officer at Antidote. In this episode, Tom details a collaboration betweenphaware global association® and Antidote Technologies to accelerate lung disease research. This partnershipprovides pharmaceutical companies with end-to-end clinical trial recruitment services through an extensive network of patients with chronic lung diseases. Tom is an experienced executive leader in multiple healthcare and IT settings including sub-Saharan Africa development, US hospital and retail pharmacies, and the pharmaceutical industry. He has a personal passion and commitment to use his talents to serve the marginalized of society.

My name is Tom Krohn. I work at a company called Antidote and we’re a digital company helping patients connect to research and researchers connect to patients. Because, unfortunately, there’s still a big gap and that’s a gap we’re trying to close.

My background is in pharmacy. In fact, I grew up in a small-town drugstore in small-town North Dakota. I’ve been in medical throughout my career, which is about 30 years at this point. It’s been a mixture of international development, so I was fortunate to live and work in Madagascar for 10 years, helping build a nonprofit organization there. I came back, got back into hospital practice; I’ve worked in hospitals and in pharmacies. Fundamentally, I really got convinced that the challenges of health care were really the systems and the management of health care. I felt I had gifts in those areas. I pursued a graduate degree down in Texas and eventually landed in the pharmaceutical industry.

I worked actually at Eli Lilly for 13 years. Throughout that time, it was always in the clinical and regulatory space, especially clinical trials in changing and innovating in how clinical trials were done. Not so much from the scientific point of view, but from an operational point of view, from a business operations point of view and then, importantly in the latter four or five years at Lilly was about external engagement…