At Future Identity North America, on May 12th, Future Identity portfolio lead Laura Camplisson spoke with Dr. Leah Houston MD, Founder and CEO of HPEC. They chatted about the urgent need for better digital identity to protect patients and physicians across the healthcare sector in North America.
Leah has practiced as an emergency physician in the United States for 10 years and has seen first-hand the challenges that come from outdated and siloed identity management systems. Leah explains that she didn’t consider just how much damage could be caused until she herself was a victim of identity fraud.
“My identity, my professional numbers that allow me to authenticate myself as a doctor, write prescriptions, sign off on charts… they were being used by a hospital when I was no longer working there. I had no control over my digital self. I gave up this control to work there and when I left, the hospital retained that control.”
Now Leah is dedicated to driving the development of much safer, privacy enhancing and cost-effective identity systems for doctors and healthcare workers. She believes that a way to achieve this is through the creation of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), built on blockchain technology.
“Through decentralized identity each doctor can have an identity and we can use this to build a DAO, where we as physicians can collaborate to create the solutions of the future that will allow physicians to have ownership over their practices and retain privacy for their patient’s records.”
Watch the full session recording here.
The conversation around decentralized infrastructure, blockchain and identity continues at FTT DeFi, a live event taking place at County Hall London on 12th July 2022.