When a record changes in a government or clinic system, someone will eventually ask who changed it, when, and what it was before. A system without audit logs can't answer, and that gap is a liability, not a missing feature.
The implementation is simple: an append-only table that records the actor, the action, the before and after, and a timestamp. No updates, no deletes, the log is a witness, not a working table.
Under the Data Privacy Act, accountability isn't optional. The audit log is how you demonstrate it, and how you catch the change that shouldn't have happened.
