📰 Spotlight on Anastassia Gliadkovskaya, Senior Writer, Fierce Healthcare

Background

-Name: Anastassia Gliadkovskaya

-Home Base: New York City (seeking a quieter environment someday), originally from LA

-Role: Senior Writer at Fierce Healthcare, focused on healthcare equity and enterprise reporting

-Expertise: Combines investigative journalism background with deep interest in healthcare disparities and niche topics such as healthcare needs specific to the LGBTQ community, maternal health, and substance abuse disorder. Anastassia brings in-depth reporting to her long-form writing, with a particular focus on underrepresented healthcare issues and sustainability.

Beat Overview

-Publication: Part of the Questex family of publications, Fierce Healthcare is a national, digital-only business-to-business (B2B) newsroom covering healthcare business and policy. Unlike many B2B outlets, they operate without a paywall, reaching both industry professionals and general audiences. As Anastassia notes, “We write for an audience of healthcare professionals and people who make decisions in healthcare,” though their accessible format draws readers from advocacy communities and patient populations as well. The Fierce platform includes a variety of industry awards, podcasts and events such as the Podnosis Podcast, Fierce Health Payer Summit, Fierce DEI Awards, Fierce Pharma Week, Fierce Biotech Week, and the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Forum.

-Coverage Areas: Anastassia came to the role before the topic of social determinants of health was widely discussed, closer to the beginning of the COVID pandemic, which amplified existing disparities in the healthcare system. She covers healthcare equity issues broadly where it might touch payers, providers or even policy. She has also curated her coverage to focus particular attention to LGBTQ+ healthcare access and climate-health intersections. She focuses on “enterprise reporting, investigative reporting, feature writing—things that take time and are unique original stories.” Anastassia is also interested in diving deeper into the business of insurance and hospital systems, how they’re managed, and how that shows up in patient care.

-Angles of Interest: Anastassia gravitates toward complex healthcare stories showcasing the interplay between business interests, policy, and patient outcomes. She’s particularly drawn to hospital operations and insurance coverage issues: “What unifies these stories for me is this complicated intersection of money, third parties, and lots of different stakeholders, and basically how the patient has zero visibility into that entire process. And ultimately there are care delays or denials of care.”

Pitching Tips

-Meaningful Data: Proprietary data that supports investigative angles gets her attention. “If you’re a company that has access to proprietary data that you’d be willing to share, that is amazing,” she says, citing examples where companies like Komodo Health provided exclusive datasets that enabled deeper reporting on healthcare trends.

-Team Routing: Understand the division between Anastassia’s publication, Fierce Healthcare, which covers the intersection of healthcare business and policy and its sister publications; Fierce Biotech, which covers news related to R&D and clinical trials; and Fierce Pharma, which covers drug-related news after commercialization, including regulatory approvals and market dynamics. Here are what her colleagues at Fierce Healthcare cover:

• Heather Landi, Executive Editor – health tech and digital health market
• Paige Minemyer, Senior Writer – payers
• Davie Muoio, Associate Editor – hospitals, specifically finance, operations, strategy
• Connor Hale, Senior Editor – medical technology
• Emma Bevins, Health Tech Reporter – digital health and technology, specializing in federal health policy including telehealth, remote monitoring, AI and data privacy
• Noah Tong, Staff Writer – payers, policy

“When in doubt, pitch multiple people because there is a lot of overlap.”

-Format Preferences: As a senior writer, Anastassia focuses on long-form, enterprise reporting and rarely takes standard news pitches. “I don’t really take pitches that often, and I wish I got pitched less,” she admits candidly. She looks for stories with multimedia potential, such as data graphics, podcast episodes or photos, noting that “stories with multimedia elements are more captivating, so long-form with multimedia is always best.”

Pet Peeves

-Irrelevant Outreach: Mass-distributed “expert availability” pitches on trending topics waste her time. “When PR people send me random quote-unquote experts on random topics… that personally is not helpful to me,” she emphasizes, preferring targeted story pitches aligned with her specific coverage areas.

-Communication Channels: Contacting her through anything besides email is a major frustration. “Please, please, please do not pitch me via DM. Do not call me ever. Do not text me. Just email me,” she stresses, setting clear boundaries for professional communication.

-Jargon-Filled Materials: Press materials loaded with industry jargon create extra work for her reporting process. “I’m going to want to drill into the specifics as a reporter, and it just makes my job harder if the press release has a lot of jargon,” she explains, adding that clarity helps streamline her interview and writing process.

-Inbox Saturation: The volume of irrelevant pitches is her biggest productivity obstacle: “The biggest obstacle to me doing my job is wasted time, and the number one thing that wastes my time is a clogged inbox.” She especially dislikes life sciences pitches that should be directed to Fierce Biotech or Fierce Pharma instead.

Events and Conferences

-HIMSS and ViVE: Fierce Healthcare rotates team coverage of these major industry events.

-Association of Healthcare Journalists Conference: Anastassia personally prioritizes this event for professional development and will be attending in the coming months.

-Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Forum: Her favorite industry gathering, notable for its substantive content focus. “It’s super session and content focused with a ton of really brilliant quality improvement and physician leaders,” she says, appreciating its emphasis on data-heavy case studies over networking events.

Key Quotes

On her beat: “I really love my beat because I think it’s pretty unique. It wasn’t something that a lot of people were covering pre-COVID, and I think even within the healthcare industry itself, there wasn’t a widespread recognition of things like the social determinants of health or healthcare disparities.”

On the new White House administration: “We’re still going to be covering the facts. We’re going to be covering what’s evidence-based and what the top public health and physician experts in the country or even in the world recommend.”

On the key to working with her: “The PR people that I work with the most who are amazing have never sent me an email or a pitch that I have said no to because it’s just so perfectly personalized and they know that it’s a story I’ll jump at.”

“I always appreciate when people are interested in getting to know me as a person. It’s not often, but I love when publicists reach out with no agenda and just want to chat briefly.”

Lightning Round

-Working Hours: Standard 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time

-Content Format: Prefers “long-form with multimedia components” including podcast elements, data visualization, and photography

-Publication Priorities: “Meaningful technical coverage, actionable insights for decision makers” with focus on “policy, providers, payers, health tech, finance” and increasing emphasis on investigative journalism

-Most Excited About: Exploring emerging healthcare infrastructure trends like modular construction. “It’s such a cool thing that healthcare facilities are doing… as care moves outside the four walls of the hospital and health systems grow and expand their footprint and just want to stay adaptable.”

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