Kiki Lombarts investigates how medical specialists function in their various professional roles as both doctors and educators. The professional performance of medical specialists has been a focus of increasing interest in recent years, as well as the subject of increasing pressure. This explicit focus is part of an effort to address issues surrounding specialists' performance in fulfilling their range of care and training duties, including questions about poor performance. Lombarts's research seeks to shed a new light on the professional performance of medical specialists, to explain it and, where possible, to improve it.

Lombarts has been active in intramural, curative healthcare since 1992, and has worked in various positions, including as a care adviser to the CBO quality institute for healthcare, as a supervisor at the Sint Anna healthcare group (in Geldrop), as an independent quality policy consultant  for medical specialists and as scientific researcher at the AMC-UvA. She has also worked in a dual role as researcher and independent organisational adviser for many years. Since 2010, Lombarts's work has focused mainly on scientific research.

At the AMC-UvA, Lombarts's research group is developing and studying various quality evaluation and improvement systems – and their effects – that specifically target medical specialist training programmes and the quality of care. The most widely known of these is the SETQ system (System for Evaluation of Teaching Qualities), which is currently used by thousands of doctors to evaluate the quality of medical specialist educators. In 2011, Lombarts received a large grant from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport for her research. She has published numerous articles on quality care in relation to medical specialists and hospitals, and has been a participant in and adviser to many committees involved in this theme.

Lombarts is also a member of the Scherpbier II committee, which is responsible for monitoring the quality of medical specialist training programmes, and of the academic advisory board of the Netherlands Association of Healthcare Supervisors, as well as the Supervisory Board of the Dutch Pink Ribbon Foundation.