Upside Names Ryan Walsh Vice President of Partnerships

The health plan partnership leader, who spent nearly a decade litigating healthcare cases before moving to the payer side, joins Upside to lead growth with health plans.

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL — Upside, a nationally scalable housing stability platform purpose-built for healthcare, today announced that Ryan Walsh has joined the company as Vice President of Partnerships. Walsh brings experience building health plan partnerships across digital health, along with nine years practicing healthcare litigation. He will lead partnership development with health plans, bringing Upside’s housing stability programs to new markets and populations.

Walsh joins as Upside expands its work with health plans addressing housing instability across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and D-SNP populations. Housing is a newer line of business for most plans, which means the conversation runs past clinical value into contracting, compliance, and what a plan can actually document. Walsh has worked both sides of that table. His job is to build partnerships that hold up in the contract and in the field.

Before joining Upside, Walsh served as Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Legal Affairs at Circadian Health, a virtual-first specialty provider network delivering home-based diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. Earlier, he was Director of Health Plan Partnerships at Papa, the companionship network serving older adults and vulnerable populations through health plans. Before moving to healthcare services, Walsh spent nine years as a partner at Green Law Offices in Chicago, managing high-exposure healthcare litigation from inception through trial. He began his career at Parrillo, Weiss & O’Halloran, where he individually tried more than 70 jury trials and over 250 arbitrations.

“I spent the first part of my career in courtrooms, watching what happens after the system fails someone, and the last part building partnerships meant to keep that from happening,” said Ryan Walsh, Vice President of Partnerships of Upside. “Housing is where that failure usually starts. Plans know it, and most of them want to act on it. What they need is a partner who can put a real operating model behind the promise, document it, and stand behind the results. That is what we do, and that is why I am here.”

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