Upside Names Austin Burch Senior Vice President of Operations

The healthcare operator, who helped build Papa from first employee to a $1.4B valuation, joins Upside to lead operations across the full member journey.

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL — Upside, a nationally scalable housing stability platform purpose-built for healthcare, today announced that Austin Burch has joined the company as Senior Vice President of Operations. Burch brings more than a decade of experience building and scaling care delivery models for multi-site and virtual-first healthcare organizations. He will lead operations across the end-to-end member experience, from referral through engagement and ongoing support.

Burch joins as Upside expands its work with health plans and employers addressing housing instability across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and D-SNP populations. Housing work happens in the field, in real time, with real people, and getting it right at scale takes operational discipline behind every referral, placement, and follow-up. Burch will partner closely with product and go-to-market teams to turn strategy into delivery and to make sure members get timely, coordinated support at every step.

Before joining Upside, Burch served as Vice President of Operations at Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine, where he led national operations as the specialty care provider expanded across clinics and virtual settings. Earlier, he was a founding team member at Circadian Health, serving as Chief Operating Officer, Senior Vice President of Operations, and Chief Compliance Officer, and helping scale the company from pre-revenue to national payer presence in under a year. He was also the first employee at Papa, the companionship network for commercial and government health plans, where he built client operations, customer care, and business intelligence functions supporting more than 200 programs and over 100 national health plan clients, and helped grow the company to a $1.4B valuation by its Series D. Burch holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Florida State University and completed executive coursework at The Wharton School. He is the founder of the Shane Carpenter Foundation and serves on several nonprofit boards.

“I have spent my career building the operations behind healthcare models that ask a lot of the people delivering them, and Upside is the clearest version of that I have seen,” said Austin Burch, Senior Vice President of Operations of Upside. “Housing is one of the hardest problems in healthcare because it does not resolve in a phone call or a single visit. It takes a Care Guide who knows the member, knows the market, and stays with it until the lease gets signed. My job is to build the systems and the teams that let that work happen consistently, in every market we serve.”

Burch’s appointment reflects Upside’s continued investment in the operational depth behind its model. As more health plans turn to housing as a lever for better outcomes and lower cost, Upside is building the capacity to meet them — helping members solve housing problems to completion so the lease gets signed and the ER visits stop.