Christina Farr is a New York–based health-tech advisor, investor, and journalist, best known as the author of Second Opinion, a weekly newsletter read by more than 22,000 health professionals. She co-runs the venture fund Scrub Capital, advises STAT Summit, and serves as Co-Chair of Fortune Brainstorm Health, an invitation-only conference convening leaders at the intersection of business, technology, and healthcare. Farr is a frequent commentator and quoted expert in outlets including STAT, Newsweek, Fast Company, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal. She most recently served as a principal at OMERS Ventures, with a focus on behavioral health, telemedicine, electronic medical records, and women’s health, and previously worked as a writer and on-air contributor for CNBC, Fast Company, and Reuters. With more than 350,000 social media followers, she is among the most influential voices in health technology, and her forthcoming book on the power of storytelling in business will be published by Hachette in 2025.

The Pulse: To begin, could you walk us through your professional journey, from journalism to investing and advising, and how that path shaped how you think about healthcare innovation?

Chrissy Farr: I started my career in journalism and spent about a decade working across different newsrooms, always focused on the intersection of health and technology. I benefited from being early. People didn’t care about health tech quite as much in 2010 and 2011. The space was dominated by electronic health record companies like Athenahealth and Practice Fusion.

Journalism was an intense training ground. I was often responsible for uncovering non-public information about public companies, which meant developing trusted relationships across the industry and learning how to ask good questions and earn credibility with people who had a lot at stake. Over time, people began to view me as a reliable source for understanding what was really happening in healthcare.

That eventually led me into venture capital. I joined OMERS Ventures, the direct investing arm of a large Canadian pension fund, where I led healthcare investing for several years. More recently, I’ve continued investing through Scrub Capital, while also building Second Opinion, a media company focused on health and technology.

That combination, reporting, investing, and now media, has shaped how I evaluate companies. I’m deeply comfortable doing qualitative work: calling people, digging into teams and markets, and understanding incentives. I had to learn the financial and legal side of investing, but I’ve found that journalism is actually an excellent foundation for venture, as long as you’re willing to do the work and recognize what you don’t yet know.

The Pulse: From your broader vantage point across media, investing, and policy, how do you see women’s health fitting into the healthcare innovation landscape today?

CF: We now have multiple women’s health companies that have reached unicorn status. These are real businesses with meaningful revenue, margins, and growth trajectories. Several could plausibly go public.

The question is: why did it take so long?

Women make roughly 80 percent of healthcare decisions, yet for years venture capital failed to treat women’s health as a serious market. That disconnect isn’t just a diversity issue; it reflects a failure of basic business logic, shaped in part by the fact that only about 11 percent of people in decision-making roles at venture capital firms are women.

That’s why it took so long for companies like Maven or Midi to scale. Kate Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven, has spoken openly about how Maven’s early funding rounds were led almost entirely by women investors. There’s a reason for that: when she walked into a room talking honestly about pregnancy and postpartum care, women VCs didn’t dismiss or trivialize those realities.

My hope is that as more of these companies generate real exits, the next generation of investors will finally recognize the opportunity that was hiding in plain sight.

The Pulse: Venture capital and healthcare leadership have historically been very homogeneous spaces. How has your experience as a woman shaped the way you evaluate healthcare innovation?

CF: Experiencing pregnancy and postpartum care firsthand was incredibly clarifying for me. It felt like the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done. I saw friends experience serious complications, and I had my own risk factors as well. It became very clear that the system is not built for women.

Outcomes are especially poor for lower-income women, rural women, and women of color — but even across the U.S. population, maternal outcomes are worse than in peer countries. You are statistically safer giving birth in Canada, the UK, or Australia than in the United States. That’s unacceptable.

Those experiences forced me to ask deeper questions about why the system functions the way it does and whose needs it prioritizes.

The Pulse: You’ve spoken about how incentives shape outcomes. How do policy and payment structures influence women’s health innovation today?

CF: Almost everything that’s broken in healthcare comes back to incentives.

Take postpartum care. In the U.S., a woman is often sent home after delivery with no reimbursable visit until six weeks later. There’s no payment for a home visit during the most vulnerable period after birth. In countries like Australia, a provider comes to the home — and that visit is fully covered. We simply don’t have that infrastructure here.

Another example is obstetrics payment. OBs are typically paid a fixed bundled rate that hasn’t evolved with changing patient risk. Women are having children later, with higher-risk pregnancies, yet reimbursement hasn’t adjusted accordingly. That makes it increasingly difficult for OBs to run sustainable practices while delivering safe care.

Then there’s breastfeeding. While it is heavily promoted to women, which is positive, we don’t have the infrastructure to support it. For instance, we don’t provide the structural support women need to make it feasible, like federally mandated paid leave. These contradictions are everywhere, and they’re largely policy-driven.

The Pulse: What role can private-sector startups play in pushing these systems forward?

CF: Private companies are doing important work, particularly around midwifery and doula care, and proving that alternative care models can deliver value. Countries with strong midwifery systems consistently have better maternal outcomes.

At the same time, I’m deeply concerned about millions of people losing Medicaid access over the next few years. Startups can help fill some gaps, but without stable coverage and transportation, the challenges compound quickly.

I’m wary of what I’d call “toxic positivity” — the idea that every conversation must end on an optimistic note. When it comes to women’s health, I think we need to be clear-eyed. I don’t believe we’re currently moving in the right direction and acknowledging that reality is necessary if we want real change.

The Pulse: From an investor’s perspective, what signals help distinguish women’s health innovation that’s likely to be durable?

CF: Demand is exploding, especially for virtual care. Recent data from Wheel, one of the largest enablers of virtual care delivery in the US, revealed that more than half of virtual visits in 2025 were related to women’s health including hormone replacement therapy, GLP-1s, birth control, and UTI treatment. That demand isn’t going away.

Employer benefits have also changed dramatically. Ten years ago, fertility or pregnancy support was rare. Today, most large, self-insured employers offer some kind of benefit through companies like Maven, Progyny, Carrot, or Kindbody. And many of these companies are now quite late-stage with real revenue and big customers, which is another promising trend.

Consumer models are also maturing. Companies like Midi have shown that you can build insurance-based consumer businesses with sustainable economics. And importantly, many of these companies are now looking seriously at opportunities in Medicaid. You simply can’t address women’s health at scale without it. 

Those trends, real revenue, payer integration, and addressing high-need populations, are what signal durability to me.

The Pulse: Looking ahead to 2030, what would meaningful progress in women’s health actually look like?

CF: We need to have honest conversations about reproductive care and medical training, even when it’s uncomfortable. Restrictions on abortion care don’t just affect access to abortion; they affect providers’ ability to learn how to deliver safe prenatal and obstetric care. For example, when abortion care is restricted, it also limits clinical training. Procedures like dilation and curettage are essential to managing pregnancy complications, and gaps in training can directly affect patient safety. Another worrying trend is that fewer medical students are choosing obstetrics.

We also need more women founders and more capital behind them. Just as importantly, the women who have broken through need to actively mentor and support the next generation. Joanna Strober at Midi is a great example of someone who consistently picks up the phone and helps others navigate the path.

Ultimately, it’s only when these founders succeed at scale that the industry is forced to reckon with the opportunity it ignored for so long.

Closing Note: Farr’s perspective is both sobering and pragmatic: women’s health remains constrained by misaligned incentives, inadequate representation, and poor policy choices. As healthcare leaders look toward 2030, her message is clear: durable progress will require more than optimism alone; it will demand better alignment between capital, care delivery, and political will around women’s safety and health.