Collect medical information from patients, family members, or other medical professionals
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 36 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 36 occupations that perform it.
- Assess patients for risk of suicide attempts.
- Obtain and record patients' medical histories.
- Obtain, compile, and record patient medical data, including health history, progress notes, and results of physical examination.
- Obtain information from medical records, medical staff, family members and the patients, themselves, to assess patients' capabilities, needs and interests.
- Interview participants to obtain medical history or assess participant goals.
- Gather client information from sources such as case documentation, client observation, or interviews of client or family members.
- Gather diagnostic data from sources such as case documentation, observations of clients, or interviews with clients or family members.
- Observe, interview, and assess patients to identify care needs.
- Perform pre-anesthetic screenings, including physical evaluations and patient interviews, and document results.
- Obtain and record patient information, including patient identification, medical history, and examination results.
- Collect and record patient information, such as medical history or examination results, in electronic or handwritten medical records.
- Collect, record, and maintain patient information, such as medical history, reports, or examination results.
- Interview patients to obtain information, such as complaints, symptoms, medical histories, and family histories.
- Collect, record, and maintain patient information, such as medical histories, reports, or examination results.
- Gather and maintain patient information and records, including social or medical history obtained from patients, relatives, or other professionals.
- Obtain patients' histories from electronic records, patient interviews, dictated reports, or by communicating with referring clinicians.
- Collect medical histories and general health and lifestyle information from patients.
- Interview patients to document symptoms and health histories.
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 research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
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
36 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Acupuncturists
- Art Therapists
- Cardiologists
- Cardiovascular Technologists and Technicians
- Chiropractors
- Clinical Nurse Specialists
- Dietetic Technicians
- Emergency Medicine Physicians
- Exercise Physiologists
- Family Medicine Physicians
- General Internal Medicine Physicians
- Genetic Counselors
- Health Information Technologists and Medical Registrars
- Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists
- Medical Dosimetrists
- Medical Records Specialists
- Mental Health Counselors
- Midwives
- Music Therapists
- Naturopathic Physicians
- Neurodiagnostic Technologists
- Neurologists
- Nurse Anesthetists
- Nursing Assistants
- Obstetricians and Gynecologists
- Ophthalmic Medical Technicians
- Ophthalmic Medical Technologists
- Orthotists and Prosthetists
- Pediatricians, General
- Phlebotomists
- Physician Assistants
- Psychiatric Technicians
- Psychiatrists
- Radiologic Technologists and Technicians
- Radiologists
- Recreational Therapists
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Collect information about patients or clients”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Collect information from people through observation, interviews, or surveys | 17 |
| Gather medical information from patient histories | 15 |
| Collect information about clients | 10 |
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.