When co-founder Nasha Fitter’s youngest daughter was diagnosed with the rare disease FOXG1 syndrome, Nasha quickly learned that despite access to great care there was little to no information about the disease or how to navigate it, and not a single therapy on the market. She launched a nonprofit organization to address this gap and quickly found that access to rich clinical information was the biggest gap in advancing research for a cure. 

In 2017, Farid co-founded a company, Ciitizen, where the goal was to build a platform that allowed cancer patients seamless access to their data. When Nasha joined the company in 2018 and helped evolve its focus into rare disease, it became clear that this unique approach could unlock key clinical data and build a patient community that could fundamentally shift care for patients with rare diseases while accelerating cures. 

In 2023, Nasha and Farid co-founded Citizen Health to fundamentally flip the system on its head: empowering patients to drive their care and research through their own health data and accelerate treatments for those who need it most.

Ari is a teammate designed for the day-to-day needs of rare disease patients and caregivers interacting with the healthcare system.

As an AI-powered healthcare companion, Ari goes beyond answering questions and actually completes tasks on your behalf. It takes on the administrative, research, and coordination tasks involved in navigating healthcare, insurance, and school systems.

It reads and summarizes medical records, drafts insurance appeal letters, fills out forms, makes outbound phone calls, logs into health portals and insurance sites on your behalf, tracks symptoms, finds clinical trials, and identifies benefits programs you may qualify for.

You confirm before Ari acts; it takes on the work for you.

Ari is built for patients and families managing complex care — primarily patients and parents of children with rare disease and developmental conditions or chronic illness. 

This includes if your situation is complicated — with a long list of conditions and providers.

Ari remembers your full history across sessions, consolidates information from multiple caregivers and sources, and builds a single longitudinal record. The more complex your situation, the more Ari does — because the coordination burden scales with complexity, and Ari absorbs that burden rather than placing it back on you.

Ari is currently in early access and completely free for members of partner patient advocacy groups.

In the future, some of Ari's functionality will be priced to reflect the cost of running the service, a monthly fee in a similar range to other AI products. There will be a free tier that covers full access to your medical records and the ability to extract answers from them to a certain usage limit.

Ari is designed to remain accessible to those who need it most — those who can't afford a $300/hour patient advocate.

By agreeing to share your health information for research, you can help drug companies and research physicians to better understand the experience of patients like you, which can help lead to new treatments in the future.

If you agree to your information being shared for observational research, we will share a summary of your profile with our research partners, for research purposes only. The information about you that we share with researchers will not contain information like your name, date of birth, phone number, address or other information that can be easily used to identify you. In addition, we will contractually prohibit vetted partners from attempting to re-identify the information.

Should a patient’s information be included in a study, Citizen Health is committed to returning a portion of the value gained from this study with users to the extent permitted by law (for example, in the form of direct payment, services, discounts, donations, or other value) or to donate this value to an advocacy or research non-profit as directed by the patient.

Sign up for Ari, send a text, and Ari will ask what's overwhelming you right now — whether it's insurance, school paperwork, symptom tracking, finding benefits, or researching your condition.

Ari will guide you through a first task that produces real value in under five minutes. No AI experience required. No forms to fill out first. Just tell Ari what's going on.