Proof of compliance (PoC): a consensus mechanism to verify the compliance with informed consent policy in healthcare

Abstract

Healthcare industries are subject to various laws and regulatory oversight, just like other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, education, and financial services. Compliance with these regulations is essential for the organization's operation and growth. To help organizations detect early non-compliance issues, this paper proposes a consensus mechanism, Proof of Compliance (PoC), where a set of distributed, decentralized, and independent auditor nodes perform audit operations to determine the compliance status of any logical operations or accesses that have already been approved, granted, or executed in the system. The Proof of Compliance consensus mechanism helps organizations minimize compliance challenges. Organizations can consider PoC outputs to take further actions to reduce non-compliance cases and avoid compliance issues and business losses. The PoC reports do not support final regulatory compliance certification. However, it is possible if one or more multiple audit nodes are deployed and maintained in the consensus mechanism by the corresponding regulatory, government, or compliance authority.