A timeline gives a dynamic, historically accurate picture of an entity, usually a patient, over time. In database terms, it’s a table with a grain of one row per patient-period, with the additional property that these periods must be non-overlapping. In other words, there is at most a single, unambiguous state of the entity on any given date.
Rule of Thumb: Interval- and entity-denominated measures use timelines for their denominator's base objects.
Example: Timeline for a single patient’s count of nephrologist office visits in the past 12 months
