ER Physician, Founder, and Coruzant feature joined The Digital Executive podcast with some updates on her contributions to help stem the spread and help cure COVID-19. Initially, Dr. Houston was to join us for her latest on her company, HPEC, and how she is on a quest to fix healthcare using Blockchain technology. While we did touch on this during this podcast, we chatted about a very timely subject, COVID-19.
This time-sensitive podcast did provide an update for Dr. Houston and this world-wide pandemic. Dr. Houston was just named Chief Medical Officer at Crown Biotechnology, and consults for Zymo Research. She is currently working with these organizations together to obtain FDA approval on a unique and effective coronavirus test to fight this pandemic. This particular test has been shown to be more effective than other current test kits also being fast-tracked for approval.
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Leah Houston, MD is the founder of HPEC, and a board-certified Emergency Physician. While practicing emergency medicine across the US for nearly 10 years she recognized a common problem: uncompensated administrative burdens related to physician employment and credentialing are a leading cause of administrative waste and physician burnout.
She realized that Blockchain could solve the obstructive regulatory problems in healthcare with its distributed ledger technology, by creating a decentralized community of physicians. She began working on the project and named it HPEC – the Humanitarian Physicians Empowerment Community. HPEC is building a platform that will give every physician a self-sovereign digital identity attached to their credentials in order to create a democratic digital physicians guild. HPEC will streamline the current antiquated and laborious process of credentialing, reduce administrative waste, improve access to care and give physicians sovereign ownership of their data and employment rights. The organization will also create an opportunity for physicians to communicate more efficiently about policy, and practice in order to improve patient care.
In presenting a solution that has the potential to alleviate the administrative waste for health systems, government and practicing physicians she is a recognized and requested national speaker on the topic of decentralized identity as it relates to healthcare. Her work was featured as a part of the first HIMSS Blockchain and Healthcare Textbook, published in 2019. A lifelong advocate, innovator and investor she has also spent lobbying for public policy and healthcare reform. She understands the problems that plague the healthcare system from the inside and out, and has dedicated her time to repairing the current global healthcare crisis. HPEC will restore physician autonomy to the practice of medicine, will begin in the United States and expand.
