OSEIN Member Spotlight: Dr. Megan Battin
Dr. Megan Battin is an OB-GYN physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has been an active member of the Ohio State Early Investor Network for several years, where her clinical background shapes how she evaluates early-stage healthcare companies.
Q: You came to investing from medicine. Walk us through that path. What pulled you in?
A: I didn't set out to become an investor. I started as a physician who got really interested in why some innovations make it into clinical practice and others do not. I also got curious about how to solve some of the problems we face, especially in women's health. So I started getting more involved in startups, first from the clinical side, then the advisory side. Eventually I wanted some skin in the game, both to keep learning and to show how dedicated I am to this field. That is when I became an investor too. OSEIN gave me the avenue to learn how early-stage investing works, and it lets me bring something valuable to the table from my own experience.
Q: How does being a practicing physician change the questions you ask when you evaluate a company?
A: Being a practicing physician has definitely changed how I evaluate companies. I tend to ask different questions at the table. What problem are you actively solving? Is it a problem clinicians and patients care about enough to change their behavior? Is there evidence that the solution actually improves the outcome? And then, who is paying for it, and how does it fit into the existing clinical workflow? A lot of the time I use my clinical expertise to look for clinical validity, and I put on my entrepreneurial hat for commercial viability. With OSEIN, I get to use both.
Q: From your vantage point in women's health, what is the biggest opening in the space right now?
A: One of the biggest opportunities in women's health right now is moving out of an episodic, reactive mindset and into a proactive, longitudinal one. Women interact with the healthcare system across a lot of distinct phases: contraception, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, postmenopause. Historically we have treated all of those as separate markets. There is an enormous opportunity in technologies that connect those phases and improve how we diagnose and treat women outside the traditional office visit.
In maternal health specifically, remote diagnostics and monitoring are exciting. But we have to be thoughtful about what we measure and how. Detecting something earlier is not automatically valuable unless that early detection leads to an intervention that improves care or reduces cost. That is where the next generation of companies can differentiate themselves. The opportunity is not just collecting more information about women. It is turning that information into an intervention that meaningfully changes their care.
And it is worth saying plainly: for a long time it was not that no one thought to research these questions. It is that no one chose to fund them. Women's health has lacked serious funding for generations. It is finally gaining momentum and strong advocates, and we are able to fund the questions we have always been asking.
Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to get started in early-stage investing?
A: Don't try to do it alone at first, and invest in your own education. When I started, I knew medicine well, but I did not pretend to be an expert in venture investing. Cap tables, convertible notes, valuations, dilution, follow-on financing, all of that was a completely different skill set. Joining a group like OSEIN let me lean on and learn from people who have expertise I don't.
The other thing I would say is to identify your own unfair advantage. Mine is women's health and clinical medicine. Someone else's might be engineering, regulatory strategy, finance, or operations. You don't need to know everything. You need to know what you know better than most people, and then surround yourself with people who fill in the gaps. Early-stage companies can succeed or fail in so many ways that it is risky to evaluate them through just your own lens. Someone at the table always asks a question I never would have thought to ask, and suddenly I see the company completely differently. That community is what accelerates your learning.
Q: Looking ahead, what are you most excited to back, and what has OSEIN meant to you?
A: I am most excited about technologies that make care more personalized and move the right pieces of care outside the traditional system. That includes diagnostics, remote monitoring, AI tools, novel drug delivery, and precision approaches in women's medicine. But it is not always about the technology. I am most cautious about tools that generate more data without showing a change in outcomes. In healthcare it is easy to say we can detect this earlier or measure this at home. My next question is always, then what? We can measure it is a very different question from should we measure it.
As for OSEIN, I have loved my time here. It helped me become a stronger investor and filled a drive I always wanted to fill while practicing medicine. It also taught me that angel investing really is a team sport. The value is not just pooling capital, it is pooling judgment. I feel grateful to sit at the table with so many smart people from so many different backgrounds, and I am learning at a rate I had missed since graduating. I hope more people join.