Meet Christina Fattore, our newest Associate on Upfront’s investment team. With a clinical background and hands-on experience scaling healthcare systems across diverse networks, Christina brings a valuable operator lens to the team and firm.

If you're a founder building in the healthcare space, be sure to reach out to her and say hello.

Now, over to Christina to share more about her background and what brought her to Upfront!

When I moved to LA six years ago, I had no job, no car, and no real plan - just a freshly minted master’s in Clinical Nutrition and the determination to become a Registered Dietitian. After growing up in Connecticut, attending NYU, and quickly losing interest in dressing for three seasons before noon, I knew I wanted something different - something grounded in science, impact, and helping people heal.

My first job was as a staff dietitian at an eating disorder treatment center in Beverly Hills, just after completing clinical rotations across transplant, ICU, oncology, and emergency units at a high-acuity, low-income hospital in Newark, New Jersey. I expected contrast: different patients, different resources, different challenges. But the barriers to care were the same. I once spent hours rewriting insurance forms for a teenage patient - replacing “weight stable” with “bradycardic and orthostatic,” then “no new concerns” with “continued hair loss and blue extremities,” trying to make clear just how sick she still was. She lost coverage anyway. Wherever I worked, the system found new ways to fail the people it was meant to serve. To change that, I knew I had to understand how those decisions were actually made.

At Optum, I worked in risk adjustment - learning how healthcare uses complex coding to turn clinical conditions into reimbursement strategies, where the right combination of diagnoses can mean the difference between profit and loss. Later, at Equip and Fay, I led clinical partnerships with academic medical centers, IPAs, nonprofits, and health systems - working across stakeholders to bring patients the kind of modern care and resources mine never had.

These roles didn’t make me cynical, they gave me context. I watched promising digital tools fail because they couldn’t work in real care settings. I saw clinical models stall because the teams building them had never sat across from a patient whose coverage had just been denied. That conviction is what brought me to venture, to Upfront, and to a team focused on building healthcare’s next chapter from the ground up.

Two areas I’m especially eager to explore (and where I see real transformation already underway) are:

AI-driven care delivery transformation. For the first time, AI has the potential to fundamentally change how care is delivered - not just through administrative efficiency, but by augmenting clinical decision-making and personalizing treatment at scale. Too many people talk about AI in health tech using buzzwords while failing to understand its application in actual care delivery.

The metabolic health revolution. We're witnessing a significant shift from episodic intervention to long-term, outcomes-driven engagement that addresses root causes rather than symptoms.

I'm a clinician turned operator turned investor, still asking the same question I started with: how do we build something better?