How Virta Health uses Figma to help patients reverse type 2 diabetes | Figma Blog

Virta Health uses Figma as a collaborative foundation for designing healthcare experiences aimed at reversing type 2 diabetes. The company’s transparent, shared design process helps teams create consistent patient interfaces, involve non-designers, and move from ideas to implementation quickly. Figma’s real-time collaboration and reusable components have become central to Virta’s design culture and operational speed.

Designing for High-Stakes Healthcare

• Virta provides treatment for type 2 diabetes and other chronic metabolic diseases without medication or surgery.
• Its mission is to reverse diabetes for 100 million people by 2025.
• Reported results after one year include:
  • 94% of insulin users reducing or eliminating insulin use.
  • 60% of patients reversing type 2 diabetes.
• Because healthcare products directly affect patients’ lives, interfaces must be intuitive, predictable, and reliable.

Real-Time Collaboration Across Teams

• Virta’s 11-person design team operates as a transparent internal hub for designers, developers, marketers, and physicians.
• Since the company adopted Figma early, its designs have been accessible and current from anywhere and on any machine.
• Designers share files in Slack, where teammates can immediately open the canvas, comment, duplicate work, and suggest improvements.
• New team members can get productive quickly because the latest designs and decisions live in Figma.

Consistency Through Components

• Virta treats consistency as essential: patient and physician workflows should behave predictably across the app.
• Figma components let designers reuse interface elements instead of recreating them manually.
• The team developed a component library based on structural components and nested components.
• Components support responsive desktop and mobile versions within a shared system.
• Virta is applying the same structural principles to its codebase to reinforce consistency between design and implementation.

Empowering Non-Designers

• Figma allows marketing, product, leadership, developers, and physicians to participate directly in design work.
• During the VirtaHealth.com relaunch, the entire process—from ideation through developer handoff—took place in Figma.
• Shared visibility enabled faster feedback and helped the first page launch within a month.
• Marketing teams use templated Figma files for social graphics, landing pages, and other collateral.
• Non-designers can create assets independently, then tag designers for targeted reviews or illustration requests.
• This self-service approach eliminated multiple design cycles and reduced the process by weeks.

Virta’s experience suggests that collaborative design tools are most valuable when they become part of the company’s operating model, not merely a place to create mockups. Shared files, reusable components, and broad participation helped the company deliver faster while maintaining the consistency and clarity required in healthcare.