Drugviu

ViuHealth, originally launched as DrugViu, is a digital health company serving people living with autoimmune and other chronic conditions. The original DrugViu platform was an online service where Asian American, Black, Latino and Native American patients could review their experiences with specific medications; the company aggregated those self-reported outcomes by demographic so users could see how drugs performed in people like them, and combined the data with public sources such as FDA and CDC data. It described itself as an AI-driven population health platform expanding the clinical trial dataset on immunology health and medication outcomes for diverse populations, pairing authenticated user-generated health profiles from minority populations with deidentified EHR data from health systems to optimize inclusion/exclusion criteria for trials. The company also built a proprietary Diverse Clinician Network of specialists who refer patients to the platform, intended to lower participant acquisition cost and build trust with populations historically skeptical of the healthcare system. Initially agnostic to disease type, the founders narrowed focus to autoimmune conditions after observing higher engagement from that population.

Following the launch of the ViuHealth care platform in early 2022 and a formal rebrand announced in October 2022, the company moved beyond recruiting diverse patients for autoimmune drug trials toward personalized digital care. The current product is a remote care application that pairs patients with a virtual Care Team of nurses and board-certified health coaches for day-to-day support between physician visits, alongside symptom and flare tracking with personalized analytics, medication reminders, and a wellness session library branded ViuMind. Supported conditions include ankylosing spondylitis, fibromyalgia, lupus, psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, Sjogren's, myasthenia gravis, multiple sclerosis, neuromyelitis optica, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease, celiac disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, alopecia areata, psoriasis and vitiligo. Clinical trial matching and enrollment remains part of the offering.

Founding story

Co-founders Kwaku Owusu and Melanie Igwe had previously founded Ilerasoft, a medtech company that built an efficiency score—described as a credit score—for hospital medical device inventory management, raising about $950,000 from investors including Backstage Capital. While speaking on an FDA panel about medical device safety and post-trial technology, they heard a fellow panelist describe the lack of diverse representation in medical device and pharmaceutical testing: minorities make up roughly 40% of the U.S. population but historically under 5-6% of clinical trial participants. Owusu, who had been working in healthcare consulting and finance, decided to address that gap, and the pair launched the DrugViu website in March 2019 while working out of the MATTER healthcare incubator at Chicago's Merchandise Mart.

Business model

ViuHealth sells into two channels: patients with autoimmune conditions seeking daily care support, and physician practices seeking to manage patients between visits. For physicians, the company positions its technology-driven, clinician-led care management as a way to capture new reimbursements and to offload disease-specific patient education to its virtual Care Team, with records shared securely via EHR. The earlier DrugViu model centered on recruiting diverse patients for clinical trial sponsors and collecting real-world evidence on medication outcomes.

The physician-facing offering is framed around enabling practices to uncover and capture new reimbursements through clinician-led autoimmune care management; earlier the company recruited diverse patients for clinical trial sponsors.

Traction

By late 2019 the company reported 32,000 medication outcomes collected and growth of 30% per week, and more than 10,000 visitors to the site in its first few months without marketing. It partnered with clinics, oncologists and specialty pharmacies in Ghana, Nigeria, Texas, Illinois and Hawaii. Investors have described it as having name-brand customers unusual for a company at its stage.

Latest developments

In January 2024 ViuHealth announced a partnership with The Leaders Rheum to expand independent rheumatology providers' virtual care capacity and reimbursement capture. In August 2024 CEO Kwaku Owusu published an open letter describing the company's shift toward continuous, day-to-day autoimmune care in collaboration with healthcare providers while retaining clinical trial matching.