Why Data Quality Is Getting Harder, with Wes Michael
A conversation with Wes Michael, founder of Rare Patient Voice.
Ammar Khan
Wes Michael had been running Rare Patient Voice for less than a year when he opened his computer one morning and saw something that did not belong.
A hundred new patient signups had come in overnight. His first thought was that the panel had gone viral. Then he looked closer. The diseases the new respondents had listed were in alphabetical order.
"That doesn't happen by chance," he said. "So that was my first taste of fraud."
David Graham, CEO and Co-Founder of VerifyYou, sat down with Wes for the first episode of HumanHour, our conversation series on what it takes to keep the data businesses run on actually human. Wes built Rare Patient Voice into one of the most trusted patient panels in the industry over more than a decade, and earlier this year the company was acquired by Konovo. He has spent 40+ years in market research, which means he has been thinking about fraud, data quality, and panel integrity longer than most companies in the space have existed.
The conversation moved through the story of how he built RPV by showing up at hemophilia conferences with clipboards in 1998, through the early years of catching fraudsters by looking for Harry Potter names in signup forms, to the present moment, where AI is making every part of the problem harder. What stood out across the conversation was how much of his fraud playbook was earned the hard way. Manual review, phone calls back to suspect accounts, and physical mailing addresses used to flag networks of fakes long before software could catch them. Every method he relied on came with a cost his team absorbed so clients did not have to.
That cost is the whole reason VerifyYou exists. Toward the end of the conversation, Wes put it cleaner than we ever could:
"With tools like VerifyYou, AI becomes a force for good. It helps prevent AI-driven fraud and can be done with much lower friction than what we built over the years."
Wes Michael, Founder and President, Rare Patient Voice
That line captures the thesis of HumanHour. The people who built this industry the right way carry knowledge that does not transfer easily to a younger generation of operators inheriting a fraud landscape now flooded with AI-generated bad actors. Conversations like this one are how we preserve some of it.
The full episode is on YouTube.
Watch the full conversation →