Assess physical conditions of patients to aid in diagnosis or treatment
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 11 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Judging the Qualities of Objects, Services, or People (4.A.2.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 11 occupations that perform it.
- Observe ultrasound display screen, and listen to signals to record vascular information, such as blood pressure, limb volume changes, oxygen saturation, and cerebral circulation.
- Assess characteristics of patients' pain, such as intensity, location, or duration, using standardized clinical measures.
- Perform annual gynecologic exams, including pap smears and breast exams.
- Check patients' pulse, temperature, and respiration.
- Observe or examine patients to detect symptoms that may require medical attention, such as bruises, open wounds, or blood in urine.
- Complete physical checks and monitor patients to detect unusual or harmful behavior and report observations to professional staff.
- Measure patients' range-of-joint motion, body parts, or vital signs to determine effects of treatments or for patient evaluations.
- Assess clients' soft tissue condition, joint quality and function, muscle strength, and range of motion.
- Interview patients to obtain medical information and measure their vital signs, weight, and height.
- Examine animals to detect behavioral changes or clinical symptoms that could indicate illness or injury.
- Perform nursing duties, such as administering medications, measuring vital signs, collecting specimens, or drawing blood samples.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for judgment, authorisation and strategy, and what it costs.
There is nothing here worth buying beyond a good assistant. Software assembles the case and recommends an answer, which any $20 assistant already does; the decision is yours, and no product on this page changes that.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
11 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Evaluate patient or client condition or treatment options”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.