Three Generations of Healthcare IT: From the Digital Record to the Computable Care Process

Objective. Healthcare IT is usually organized by the technologies it adopts. We instead organize it by the unit of information a system makes computable, and describe a computational layer whose object is patient-specific clinical intent. Approach. We give criteria for a computational layer, derive three (record, clinical state, and a proposed layer of intent), and formalize the Actionable Clinical Record (ACR) as the atomic object of the third layer. Discussion. The framework distinguishes prescribed, observed, and intended process; existing standards represent intent once it is structured but do not recover it from natural communication, the capability we localize. The ACR is complementary to FHIR workflow resources, guidelines, and process mining; a companion feasibility study illustrates tractability for one narrow subproblem. Conclusion. Computable clinical intent is a coherent research direction; the ACR, its readiness ladder, and an executable-correctness evaluation framework are reusable constructs for subsequent work to extend, evaluate, or falsify.