Assist healthcare practitioners during examinations or treatments
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The documentation around care is highly automatable and that is where the time goes back. The care itself needs physical presence and someone accountable for the outcome, so this work stays where it is.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Direct care and assistance |
| Jobs that do it | 13 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents |
| O*NET activity | Assisting and Caring for Others (4.A.4.a.5) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 13 occupations that perform it.
- Assist anesthesiologists in monitoring of patients, including electrocardiogram (EKG), direct arterial pressure, central venous pressure, arterial blood gas, hematocrit, or routine measurement of temperature, respiration, blood pressure or heart rate.
- Provide assistance to other healthcare personnel during dosimetry procedures and tumor localization.
- Work as part of a team of physicians, nurses, or other healthcare professionals to manage patient care by assisting with medical procedures or related duties.
- Prepare patients for and assist with examinations or treatments.
- Assist physicians with procedures such as bronchoscopy, endoscopy, endotracheal intubation, or elective cardioversion.
- Assist ophthalmologists in diagnostic ophthalmic procedures, such as ultrasonography, fundus photography, and tonometry.
- Assist pathologists or other physicians to collect cell samples by fine needle aspiration (FNA) biopsy or other method.
- Provide assistance to physicians or other technologists in the performance of more complex procedures.
- Collaborate with or assist doctors, psychologists, or rehabilitation therapists in working with patients with cognitive, intellectual, or developmental disabilities to treat, rehabilitate, and return patients to the community.
- Provide veterinarians with the correct equipment or instruments, as needed.
- Assist audiologists in performing aural procedures, such as real ear measurements, speech audiometry, auditory brainstem responses, electronystagmography, and cochlear implant mapping.
- Perform advanced ophthalmic procedures, including electrophysiological, electrophysical, or microbial procedures.
- Assist hospital staff with patient care duties, such as providing transportation or setting up traction.
- Assist anesthesiologists in performing anesthetic procedures, such as epidural or spinal injections.
- Use a variety of testing techniques to assist doctors in cardiac or pulmonary research or to diagnose disorders.
- Take animals into treatment areas and assist with physical examinations by performing such duties as obtaining temperature, pulse, or respiration data.
- Assist in the application of monitoring techniques, such as pulmonary artery catheterization, electroencephalographic spectral analysis, echocardiography, or evoked potentials.
- Provide assistance with animal euthanasia and the disposal of remains.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing for the care itself. The time comes back from the documentation around it, so the stack worth building is the recording one, on the pages for that work.
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.
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.
Who does this work
13 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Anesthesiologist Assistants
- Critical Care Nurses
- Cytotechnologists
- Hearing Aid Specialists
- Medical Equipment Preparers
- Ophthalmic Medical Technologists
- Orthoptists
- Psychiatric Technicians
- Radiation Therapists
- Radiologic Technologists and Technicians
- Registered Nurses
- Respiratory Therapists
- Veterinary Technologists and Technicians
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Assist healthcare practitioners during medical procedures”. 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.