Right Hand at the Frontier
Christina Solomon walks into a room carrying a strange combination of credentials: Goldman Sachs analyst, Massachusetts state government data architect, ClassPass operator, Aetna strategist, Harvard MBA. Most people pick one lane. She picked all of them - and then used each one to do better work in the next.
Today she's VP of Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Carbon Health, which means she is simultaneously the person who designs where the company is going and the person who makes sure it gets there. Those two roles rarely live in the same person. At Carbon Health, mid-restructuring in 2026, they have to.
Carbon Health operates more than 90 urgent care and primary care clinics across eight states. It has served over 800,000 patients. Its EHR is being marketed to external providers. And in February 2026, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy - a word that in digital health often precedes a fire sale. Solomon's role as Chief of Staff puts her at the center of that process, close to every significant decision.
We've been busy building. Carbon Health launched hybrid Primary Care this year to make it easier to achieve everyday health. Same-day and next-day virtual appointments with in-person care when you need it.
- Christina Solomon, LinkedIn, 2023The Uncommonly Long Road to Healthcare
Solomon went to UC Berkeley for economics and development studies - not pre-med, not policy, not business. Development studies is the academic home for people who want to understand how systems work at scale. How resources flow. Why some institutions solve problems and others calcify around them. That intellectual formation shows up later in how she builds things.
She graduated into Goldman Sachs as an IBD summer analyst in 2012. The year matters: post-crisis, the industry was still rebuilding its self-image, and the analysts who came through that era tended to be more operationally rigorous than the generation before them. Finance gave her a way of thinking about risk, capital structure, and time horizons that most operators never develop.
She went to Cornerstone Research after that - an economic consulting firm where the job is to reconstruct exactly what happened inside complicated organizations, usually for litigation purposes. It's a strange and specific training for a future strategist. You spend years reverse-engineering decisions, understanding what information was available when, and building models that hold up to adversarial scrutiny. Not a bad preparation for working inside companies that are trying to figure out what they got wrong.
Harvard Business School followed. And then - crucially - she didn't go back to finance. She went sideways, into a role at ClassPass, the fitness-booking startup that was in the middle of its own awkward adolescence as a two-sided marketplace. Consumer tech. Subscription dynamics. The problem of managing supply (gyms) and demand (members) at scale. Different lessons than Goldman, and ones she'd use later when she had to think about how a health clinic network relates to its payers and its patients simultaneously.
Goldman Sachs to ClassPass to Massachusetts state government to Carbon Health. Most resumes optimize for a straight line. Solomon's reads like a series of deliberate left turns - each one landing her somewhere stranger and more useful than the last.
Career Note — YesPress EditorialThen came Aetna - one of America's largest health insurers. Digital marketing strategy, on the payer side. This is the moment the career makes sense in retrospect. Goldman gave her capital markets. Cornerstone gave her analytical rigor. ClassPass gave her marketplace dynamics. Aetna gave her the payer's perspective on healthcare - how insurance companies think about networks, cost containment, and the perpetual tension between what gets covered and what patients actually need.
Before jumping to a startup, she made one more stop: the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services. As Director of Data Strategy, she worked on the state's transition to accountable care payment models - the shift from fee-for-service to paying providers based on outcomes and total cost of care. This is hard, bureaucratic, slow, important work. The kind that requires you to understand both the policy logic and the data infrastructure simultaneously. It's also the kind of work that gives you a visceral understanding of what healthcare delivery looks like when the money flows differently.
From Payer Strategy to the Top Floor
Solomon joined Carbon Health in 2021 as Senior Business Development Manager - a step back in seniority from where she'd been, which suggests she saw something worth betting on. Carbon Health was then growing rapidly, building a hybrid care model that combined app-based virtual visits with a physical clinic network. The pitch was coherent: put technology at the center of a care experience that doesn't force patients to choose between convenience and depth.
She moved to Director of Business Development, then to Head of Payer Strategy and Operations, then to Head of Strategy, and eventually to VP of Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO. That progression - across function, not just seniority - tells you something about how she works. Each role was a different vantage point on the same underlying question: how do you build a healthcare company that actually functions financially while serving patients well?
As Head of Payer Strategy and Operations, she owned contracting, credentialing, pricing, and expansion decisions. These are the mechanisms that determine whether a clinic network can survive. Getting credentialed with payers is grinding, noncreative work that absolutely has to be done correctly. Getting contracted at the right rates is where strategy meets the bottom line directly. Solomon ran all of it.
Carbon Health's Chapter 11 filing in February 2026 came with $19.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing and a dual-track plan: either restructure through a debt-for-equity exchange or sell all or part of the company's assets. The company said explicitly that clinics would remain open, patients would experience no disruption, and it was business as usual during the process. Making that statement credibly - and then making it true - is exactly the kind of problem a Chief of Staff handles.
Her background in payer contracting and data strategy is not incidental to that moment. A restructuring in healthcare is not just a financial event. It requires the company to negotiate with insurance networks, maintain credentialing relationships, preserve clinical staff trust, and communicate clearly to 800,000 patients that nothing has changed about their care. Someone who has spent years inside all three sides of that equation - as a payer strategist, a data architect, and a clinic network operator - is more useful in that room than almost anyone else.
Hybrid Care at Scale
The Carbon Health model Solomon has helped build and articulate is specific: you can see a provider virtually the same day you want care, and if you need to be seen in person, there's a clinic for that. It sounds simple. Building the operational infrastructure to deliver it at scale - credentialed across eight states, contracted with major payers, staffed consistently, with a proprietary EHR managing the continuity of care - is genuinely hard.
Carbon Health's decision to build its own electronic health record was unconventional. Most clinic networks buy from Epic or one of its competitors. Carbon built internally, partly because its founders came from tech (Eren Bali co-founded Udemy), and partly because they believed a purpose-built system would let them do things incumbent EHRs couldn't. That bet now has a secondary upside: they're marketing the EHR to other provider groups, which changes the business model from pure provider to potential software company.
Solomon's work sits at the intersection of those strategies. Payer contracting determines which patients can access care affordably. Expansion decisions determine where to build. The Chief of Staff role coordinates all of it - translating between the clinical, operational, financial, and external dimensions of a company that has to manage all of them simultaneously.