Ro is a direct-to-patient healthcare company with a mission of helping patients achieve their health goals by delivering the easiest, most effective care possible.
Shelly Martin
Head of GRC, Ro
Ro is a rapidly growing telehealth company that supports patients throughout their personal health journey with a uniquely human, high-touch experience.
The company was used to receiving a constant flow of consumer data requests, but a new free insurance checker for prospective weight-loss patients led to a dramatic increase in the number of requests they received, jumping from about 50 to over 300 a month.
Given the popularity of modern weight-loss treatment driving new people to the brand and Ro’s diverse range of D2C offerings—including fertility, hair, skin, and sexual health treatment—ensuring even the people who didn’t enroll in weight-loss treatment received the best interaction possible was of paramount importance for Ro. Shelly Martin, Ro’s Head of GRC, explained:
“It all comes back to trust, and trust is a bucket. You fill it up and it’s fuel for the relationship with the customer. So when we can process a request really quickly, that increases trust with them.”
Trust has become more fundamental to brands and consumers alike over the years, with research such as a 2025 Edelman study finding 88% of consumers noted trust was as important as price and quality when making buying decisions. As a startup in the health sector, that reality is even more critical, as buyers are trusting brands like Ro not just with their personal data, but their health.
But before Transcend, the company had obstacles in scaling its DSR process to meet consumer demand.
With minimal integrations across data systems and little automation, fulfilling user requests was a heavily manual process that required staff to scrutinize identifiers, retrieve data from multiple systems, and check later to confirm that each request had been completed.
The approach was not scalable for the variety of technical governance requirements emerging or consumer expectations around trust and transparency. The team immediately knew their manual user request setup was untenable, with Shelly noting,
“When you have to do that 300 times, you’re always buried in a hole.”
With just a single person tasked to manage user requests and that workload sitting on top of their other responsibilities, Ro recognized the urgent need for a robust, automated, and scalable solution.
Ro faced several pressing operational and scalability hurdles before switching from a legacy privacy solution to Transcend:
Alongside the CISO and the Sr. Director of Product Security, Shelly and the Ro team evaluated vendors based on three primary criteria:
After thoroughly assessing multiple providers over the course of nearly six months, Ro chose Transcend due to its standout data orchestration capabilities and willingness to tackle Ro’s specific challenges quickly and collaboratively.
“What put [Transcend] above the others was their willingness to understand our problem and provide solutions to us quickly … we wanted to make sure we got the right product for us to scale and grow.”
After the migration of the company’s data from its previous legacy solution into Transcend and a successful implementation, the team noticed the difference immediately. Typically accustomed to having a constant queue of at least 40 DSRs, Shelly noted,
“Those first few days after we implemented Transcend, I was just looking at the dashboard waiting, but there was nothing to do, because it all just works and [the DSRs] all just processed as designed.”
Quick, efficient, and positive experiences now define Ro’s data governance operations, supporting both compliance and the personal, trust-driven relationships at the heart of their telehealth mission through:
“Our manual rate is less than 1%. It’s negligible, above zero but way below 1%.”
With Transcend, Ro has transformed manual, disconnected workflows into a unified, automated request processing engine that saves hundreds of hours a month and enables the business to deliver more trust-building experiences to its customers.
“Transcend has opened up growth for us - we can grow our program without adding resources since we’re not stuck in the drudgery of processing requests every day.”
At a time when the company’s products are supporting more people than ever, being able to operationalize a new standard of patient trust with Transcend and feel confident that standard will hold up to any scale has the company ready for what the future holds.