You've been invited to join Citizen Health

Meet Ari

Your teammate in rare disease care

Patient advocates have partnered with Citizen to bring you Ari — a personal advocate to support your day-to-day care while driving faster research for our community.
  • Get access to your health data — securely, and in your control.
  • Get a personal teammate in Ari, an AI built for rare disease.
  • Power research with your anonymized data, if you choose.

Built for rare disease communities like ours

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How Ari can help

Offload everything you’ve been holding in your head.

Symptom tracking
Text or voice. One thread. Captures everything together, not in five different apps.
Pattern detection
Ari watches frequency, intensity, time-of-day, and dose-change correlations — and proactively flags what's escalating.
Manage the MyChart mess
Labs, visits, letters, referrals — pulled without opening MyChart. Messages drafted in your voice. Ari pings you when your care team replies.
The to-do list
Scheduling appointments, following up on referrals, chasing prior auths, remembering what comes next. Ari handles the to-do list you've been carrying in your head.
Symptom tracking
Text or voice. One thread. Captures everything together, not in five different apps.
Pattern detection
Ari watches frequency, intensity, time-of-day, and dose-change correlations — and proactively flags what's escalating.
Manage the MyChart mess
Labs, visits, letters, referrals — pulled without opening MyChart. Messages drafted in your voice. Ari pings you when your care team replies.
The to-do list
Scheduling appointments, following up on referrals, chasing prior auths, remembering what comes next. Ari handles the to-do list you've been carrying in your head.

Ari users are saying

"Ari creates a weekly report for me to send to our ABA therapist. She is thrilled to have some data to track his behaviors. And it is super easy for me."
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Shelley F.
SCN8A mom
"It takes a huge weight off of the administrative side of taking care of our kids."
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Jossy A.
CACNA1A mom of Finnegan
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Trusted by patient communities

Excerpts from a 2023 article in the scientific journal Brain that used Citizen Health data: Graph depicting clinical data on seizures in STXBP1-related disorders, including types of seizures and their frequency across age groups.Scientific article titled about autism gene variants disrupting neuron migration and causing gut dysmotility.Chart excerpted from a scientific article showing ages and frequency of clinical, developmental, and behavioral traits in 101 children with FOXG1 syndrome.

Advancing life-changing research

Thousands of Citizen Health patients consent to share their data for research purposes. That data, with privacy protected through de-identification, powers Natural History Studies that can help make new treatments available years earlier.

Privacy that's more than a checkbox

Citizen Health is built on a foundation of privacy and security.

Your data belongs to you. Full stop. We protect your data along every dimension, and have received SOC2 certification of our security practices.

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Because we’re patients and caregivers too

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Farid Vij

CEO, Co-Founder

Helping navigate the medical system for his father-in-law facing cancer. Devoted to transforming the system in favor of patients and families.

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Nasha Fitter

CBO, Co-Founder

Caring for her daughter, Amara, with a rare genetic disorder. Co-founder of the FOXG1 Research Foundation to advance treatments for thousands of families like hers.

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Deven McGraw

Chief Privacy Officer

Dedicating her professional life to making it easier for fellow patients to get their medical records—while ensuring they don't have to sacrifice their privacy to do so.

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Daniel Wang

CTO

Caring as a son and as a father.  Building AI agents to take the admin work of caregiving off of humans, so that we can focus on what matters.

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Elli Brimble

Clinical Strategy

Guiding patients and families in clinic as a Certified Genetic Counselor. Now building bridges between science and the families who need it most.

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Lauren Flickinger

Product

Navigating the system for her daughter, Olive, the first US patient diagnosed with Lunapark Syndrome. Dedicated to building tools that bring real relief to families like ours.

Your records, your answers, your time—all in one place

Join the Meet Ari Invite (for influencers) community on Citizen Health. Free to set up, yours to control.
Takes about 5 minutes

Have questions about Citizen Health?

We're here to support you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was Citizen Health formed?

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.

What exactly is Ari?

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.

Who is Ari built for?

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.

How is Ari different from other health apps or chatbots?

Most health apps track data. Most chatbots answer questions. Ari acts. With your permission, it can log into your portals, make phone calls, fill out forms, draft letters, and build a longitudinal record of your health history — all on your behalf. The difference is the same as between a friend who tells you what to say to your insurance company and a friend who makes the call for you.

Does Ari give medical advice?

No. Ari is not intended to give medical advice and users should always consult their provider or care team on a medical decision. Ari surfaces information, research, and context — it does not diagnose, prescribe, or replace your care team. When Ari finds a potential drug interaction or flags a new clinical trial, it brings that information to you so you can discuss it with your doctor. The role is navigator and advocate, not clinician.

Will Ari ever act without my permission?

No. Ari always asks before sending, submitting, or taking action on your behalf. You will confirm every outbound call, every form submission, and every message. Ari is designed to prepare and execute — but never without your explicit approval.

Does Ari cost money?

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.

How does Ari handle my medical information?

Your information belongs to you. Ari never shares your data with third parties without your consent, never stores credentials in conversation, and uses secure encrypted methods for any sensitive inputs. Ari is built on the principle that your health data stays with you. Learn more about Citizen Health's commitment to privacy.

Why should I share my records for research? Will my information be identifiable?

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.

What does it mean that Citizen Health shares value with patients when their information is used in research?

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.

How do I get started?

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.

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The responses shown are simulated samples for demonstration purposes only. When you use Citizen's AI tools, they provide personalized insights based on your actual medical records. Citizen's AI tools are designed to help you understand and organize your medical information but do not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment recommendations. Always consult with your healthcare provider before making any medical decisions. Your medical information remains private and secure within Citizen Health, and is not shared with third-party AI companies or used to train their algorithms.