Clinical Audit Logs as Multi-Axial Traces of Care Delivery

Abstract

Electronic health record audit logs record timestamped actions through which clinical work is carried out. Generated as operational metadata, they now support research on clinician effort, patient outcomes, care-team coordination, and workflow structure. This Perspective explains that breadth by articulating audit logs as multi-axial event streams and drawing implications for representation learning, evaluation, and governance. Each logged action belongs simultaneously to multiple clinically meaningful relations: a clinician's work, a patient's trajectory, a team's activity, and a recurring workflow. This structure motivates foundation-model pretraining to learn reusable representations over the raw stream. Reading audit logs as multi-axial traces specifies what such representations must preserve, how their value should be tested, and how their use should be governed.