How Included Health quadrupled their research capacity with Rally and Marvin

‍Watch the event here.

Included Health is a provider of telehealth and healthcare navigation services for employers, which is to say they use cutting-edge technology to deliver smarter, faster, more efficient care for members of employer health plans. 

Making sure that technology delivers on its promises requires an extraordinary amount of recurring, high-quality user research -- and that presents challenges. Challenges that Included Health turned to Rally and Marvin to help solve.

At a recent virtual event, Rally and Marvin sat down with Mahad Bullo, Staff UX Researcher at Included Health, to talk about building a modern research stack. Mahad shared how his team is using Rally and Marvin together to remove roadblocks, increase speed, and make research a company-wide team sport. With Rally powering operations and Marvin surfacing insights, Included Health has dramatically scaled their research practice -- without increasing headcount.

The challenge: roadblocks to research

Included Health is a mission-driven healthcare platform serving 84 million Americans. For Mahad, research is core to delivering personalized care, but traditional tools were slowing his team down.

“In the early days, we had a lot of people do amazing research—but it was lost to the world.” Mahad Bullo, Staff UX Researcher at Included Health

Mahad described a few key challenges:

• Too many manual steps to launch studies
• Lack of infrastructure to support quick, frequent research
• Difficulty connecting the right people to the right studies
• Important customer feedback being buried or inaccessible

Without the right tooling, teams couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with company needs, and valuable insights were getting lost.

Mahad outlined further issues he was facing regarding additional complexities in the healthcare space:

"Healthcare has a ton of rules - privacy is very important. When we go talk to our clients, we're in a unique position. We have 84 million covered lives, but those are through big corporations, the Googles of the world. So, it's obviously this complex relationship where you have to get approval from your clients to eventually talk to your quote-unquote 'members.'" Mahad Bullo

This research overhead made conducting any single user study difficult, and doing regular, recurring research even more challenging.

"So when you talk about expanding research and research accessibility, it's really about removing those roadblocks. And you've got to remove them at every part of the process, right? This is why, obviously, I was very excited about the Rally-Marvin integration." Mahad Bullo

The solution: Rally + Marvin as a Research power stack

Included Health adopted Rally to streamline research operations and Marvin as a central insights hub. For Mahad, the pairing is essential:

"I feel like we're beyond this idea of this one-size-fits-all tool. That's not going to work for organizations anymore. Rally, you're really good at ops. Marvin, you're really good at insights." Mahad Bullo

Using Rally, the team created templates, guardrails, and vetted screeners so that studies could be launched in minutes, not days. Rally also enabled fine-grained participant segmentation based on properties from screeners and Salesforce.

“Rally allows us to reach our members in ways we haven’t been able to do before... You can spin up a study with minimal chance of messing it up in a few minutes.” Mahad Bullo

Participants are automatically routed into the right studies, and insights flow seamlessly into Marvin. The impact?

“We’ve 4x’d the amount of research we’ve done this year. Our output has increased, our cost has gone down.” Mahad Bullo

Mahad estimated that every participant they source from their user database in Rally saves them $70–$80 compared to traditional recruitment methods.

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More on the Rally + Marvin integration

One of the most powerful enablers of Included Health’s research workflow is the native integration between Rally and Marvin.

“The Marvin and Rally integration is something we use every single day.” Mahad Bullo

When a study is created in Rally, researchers can easily push participants and session data directly into Marvin. This gives the team immediate access to recordings, notes, transcripts, and tagged insights - all organized by project and ready for synthesis.

“That loop—from building your screener in Rally, to running your session, to immediately tagging insights in Marvin—is tight. That’s the dream.” Mahad Bullo

This integration removes context-switching and manual data transfer, and it helps Mahad’s team maintain momentum from study planning to insight sharing. With both tools in sync, Rally and Marvin form a complete, connected research stack that accelerates discovery and elevates research quality.

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The result: faster, safer, more impactful research

"We've actually been able through this, to 4x - I actually calculated this - 4x the amount of research we did in the last year across the board from interviews, unmoderated studies, surveys, all of the above." Mahad Bullo

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What Mahad has accomplished at Included Health is a powerful example of what’s possible with the right infrastructure. Rally gave Included Health the operational scaffolding to empower self-serve research without compromising quality or compliance. Marvin enabled deep insight discovery at scale. Together, they created a seamless research engine that helps Mahad’s team move fast, stay focused on their mission, and make member-centric decisions every day.

If you're a research leader looking to reduce friction and maximize impact, take it from Mahad:

“I can’t imagine a world in which I would not have Rally… I’m not looking to say, hey, Rally, you become more like Marvin or Marvin, you become more like Rally. I would say, just do your thing, do it really well, and allow us to connect.” Mahad Bullo