Capabilities / A · Foundational
A.5 Temporal and knowability reasoning Active
Given time-stamped records, the agent reconstructs the order of events and states whether each item of information was knowable at a stated decision time. Graded by binary checkpoints on each ordering relationship; items that cannot be decided must be marked explicitly as undecidable.
Evidence: frozen. A frozen benchmark version tests this capability. No site-verified result exists yet.
- Domain
- A · Foundational
- Evidence form
- checkpoint
- Veto constraints
- —
- Depends on
- —
- Required by
- D.1D.11D.14D.15D.18D.3D.7
- Internal task families
- doc_audit
- External anchors
- HealthBench
- Version
- 0.1.0 · 0.1.0
Definition in detail
Audits of clinical decisions depend on what was known at the time of the decision, not on what the full record shows afterwards. Reconstructing order and knowability is the basis for fair review of any time-stamped record.
Inputs a task gives
- Time-stamped records with mixed time formats and both event times and documentation times
- A stated decision time or discussion time
- Records with missing or imprecise timestamps
- The time-zone or date-shift conventions in force for the material
Artifact required
An event timeline (event_id, event_time, time_basis as event or documented, source), a set of ordering assertions (event_a, event_b, relation as before, after, simultaneous or undecidable) and a knowability table (item, knowable_at_decision_time as yes, no or undecidable, basis).
How it is graded
Each ordering relationship and each knowability item in the reference is a binary checkpoint. Items that the material cannot settle must be marked undecidable: asserting a definite order where the reference is undecidable fails the checkpoint, and marking undecidable where the order can be determined also fails it.
In scope
- Reconstructing event order from timestamps of differing precision
- Distinguishing when an event happened from when it was documented
- Deciding whether each item was knowable at a stated decision time
- Marking undecidable relationships explicitly
Out of scope
- Producing an audit list of documentation findings for a record - graded under D.1
- Pathway interval recomputation against thresholds - graded under D.11
- Cross-source linkage that does not involve time - graded under A.4
Typical failures
Expected failure patterns; not measured rates.
- Treating a documentation timestamp as the event time
- Counting a result as knowable because the specimen was collected before the decision time, although the result was reported after it
- Asserting an order for same-day events that carry no time of day
Benchmarks
- Clinical Temporal Audit Active
Grading references
No grading reference is mapped to this capability.