MedicalMommas.com is currently staffed by four journalists.
Rhonda Rowland and Diana Keough are Co-Editors-in-Chief/Senior Producers. Both are award-winning medical journalists with over 40 years of cumulative health care medical journalism in television, print, radio and internet communications under their belts.
Joining them with be producers and content editors, Andrea Kane and Gina Hill, both of whom formerly worked for the CNN Medical Unit and WebMd.
In today’s blog, we’ll highlight Rhonda Rowland.
Rhonda Rowland began her health care journalism career over 20 years ago, as an associate producer in the CNN Medical News Unit and quickly rose through the ranks to become a senior producer. Her responsibilities ranged from story research, field production, script writing, determining story coverage, vetting breaking medical news to staff assignments, reporter script approval, producing the weekend half-hour medical show, coordinating coverage of the International AIDS Conferences and more.
In 1992, Rhonda began to report on-camera as a medical correspondent. Over the next decade she reported on such issues as women’s health, mental health, neurological disorders, cancer and heart disease.
She was the first journalist to report on the breakthrough cancer drug, Gleevec, and did an exclusive story on the first artificial heart patient who was able to leave the hospital and return home. She’s reported breaking news events such as Vice President Dick Cheney’s heart trouble, the eruption of the West Nile Virus, changes in vaccine recommendations and the anthrax attacks following 9/11.
Rhonda was the first broadcast journalist to receive the American Heart Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. That year she also received the CDC’s Award for Excellence in Reporting. Other accolades include the TIME, Inc. Freddie Award in 2000 for her report “A Baby by Design,” and in 1999 for her profile piece on medical pioneer, Elisabeth Kubler Ross. Her work has been recognized by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, American College of Emergency Physicians, American College of Radiology, American College of Ob/Gyn, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the National Association of Science Writers.
Along the way she paused long enough to give birth to her son and adopt a little girl from China.
She left her television career to devote more time to her young children, working on short-term projects that kept her closer to home. Those projects included broadcast hosting and interviewing, voice-over work, consulting and media training to DVD production and segment production for the start-up venture, Everwell TV.
Rhonda is married to her college sweetheart, a fellow Wisconsin-native and University of Wisconsin alum.
