Challenges and Opportunities of Blockchain for Auditable Processes in the Healthcare Sector

Blockchain technologies (BT) promise to offer exciting research directions for improving various aspects of business processes, in particular in cross-organizational settings where participants do not fully trust each other. However, while blockchain may readily provide transparency and immutability for the processes recorded on a shared ledger, these very characteristics can be problematic in regard to privacy and data protection requirements. In this paper, we address the challenges and opportunities of using BT to secure distributed processes where participants may have an incentive to make false claims or subvert pre-agreed compliance rules in their private processes. Specifically, our analysis is based on a real-world use case, namely how BT can secure (privacy preserving) commitments to processing steps that facilitate federated machine learning (FL) in the healthcare sector. Thereby, an immutable audit trail is created that can be used to detect deviations in retrospect. Hereby, we place a particular focus on the management of patient consent for accessing their data in FL. Our approach draws inspiration from the domain of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) where BT is also relied upon to enable the creation and management of decentralized identifiers while focusing on data minimization. The results of our work are not constrained to the particular use case and can be applicable to other emerging research areas of BPM, such as federated process mining.