New episode: Lizzy Lawrence, FDA Reporter, STAT

She's also part of an award-winning team that covered United Healthcare

Fair to say that Lizzy Lawrence has been pretty busy recently in her role covering the Food & Drug Administration for STAT, a subscription-based newsroom that covers the frontiers of health and medicine.

As they say: "We take you inside the science labs and hospitals, biotech boardrooms, and political backrooms. We dissect crucial discoveries. We examine controversies and puncture hype. We hold individuals and institutions accountable. We introduce you to the power brokers and personalities who are driving a revolution in human health."

Lizzy has been with STAT for 2 1/2 years and initially started on the medical devices beat. The highlight of her time there was being a part of the reporting team that produced a Polk Award-winning investigative series about the "behemoth" that is United Healthcare (prior to the assassination of its CEO). One of the quotes she got basically told the story in a sentence " They want to use the clinicians to mine the money that lies within the bodies of the patient."

Here are three takeaways from the interview

1) Biggest Lesson Learned: Trust Your Gut

"I was very insecure when I first started. These are very wonky areas where there are people that have PhDs in some of this stuff. But I've come to learn that my role is not to know everything. My role is to ask people that know everything what they think and then gather all this information and explain to readers what's going on. The things that I find interesting, readers are likely to find interesting.

In the beginning I was like, well, maybe I should be covering this, maybe I should be covering that. But now I'm feeling more confident in decisions.

That goes for investigative reporting too. It's a lot about instinct and if you're confused on ways to handle a situation, going to mentors or using your editors."

2) The New Administration Is Going To Make It Hard

"The hardest part of the job is there's just this constant balance in the, in the Trump administration era.

Do you jump on things as they happen? Or do you wait and see until we have a little bit more information or more impact? There's so much news all the time that you have to make this decision constantly."

3) The Best Part Of The Job: Learning and Sharing

(a common answer on this podcast!)

"It's just so exciting and interesting every day you just learn so much and there's so much opportunity to share things with the public that you find out and demystify things. It's just really cool to get paid to learn and to talk to folks."

"I'm just always fascinated and excited by so many different types of people in the world and what they do and what drives them and I think I'm just always trying to question things and find out more."

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