Diagnose medical conditions
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 | 28 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Making Decisions and Solving Problems (4.A.2.b.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 28 occupations that perform it.
- Diagnose health problems by reviewing patients' health and medical histories, questioning, observing, and examining patients and interpreting x-rays.
- Make tentative diagnoses and decisions about management and treatment of patients.
- Diagnose diseases and deformities of the foot using medical histories, physical examinations, x-rays, and laboratory test results.
- Identify visual impairments related to basic life skills in areas such as self care, literacy, communication, health management, home management, and meal preparation.
- Perform physical examinations, make tentative diagnoses, and treat patients en route to hospitals or at disaster site triage centers.
- Diagnose acute or chronic conditions that could result in rapid physiological deterioration or life-threatening instability.
- Distinguish between physiologically- and psychologically-based disorders, and diagnose appropriately.
- Provide direct care by performing comprehensive health assessments, developing differential diagnoses, conducting specialized tests, or prescribing medications or treatments.
- Diagnose or treat acute health care problems, such as illnesses, infections, or injuries.
- Diagnose illnesses, using examinations, tests, and reports.
- Diagnose and treat pigmented lesions such as common acquired nevi, congenital nevi, dysplastic nevi, Spitz nevi, blue nevi, or melanoma.
- Select, request, perform, or interpret diagnostic procedures, such as laboratory tests, electrocardiograms, emergency ultrasounds, and radiographs.
- Provide and manage long-term, comprehensive medical care, including diagnosis and nonsurgical treatment of diseases, for adult patients in an office or hospital.
- Diagnose neurological conditions based on interpretation of examination findings, histories, or test results.
- Diagnose diseases or study medical conditions, using techniques such as gross pathology, histology, cytology, cytopathology, clinical chemistry, immunology, flow cytometry, or molecular biology.
- Diagnose or treat allergic or immunologic conditions.
- Diagnose, treat, or provide continuous care to hospital inpatients.
- Diagnose or treat diseases or disorders of genitourinary organs and tracts including erectile dysfunction (ED), infertility, incontinence, bladder cancer, prostate cancer, urethral stones, or premature ejaculation.
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
28 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Acute Care Nurses
- Advanced Practice Psychiatric Nurses
- Allergists and Immunologists
- Anesthesiologists
- Chiropractors
- Clinical Nurse Specialists
- Dermatologists
- Emergency Medicine Physicians
- General Internal Medicine Physicians
- Hearing Aid Specialists
- Hospitalists
- Low Vision Therapists, Orientation and Mobility Specialists, and Vision Rehabilitation Therapists
- Midwives
- Naturopathic Physicians
- Neurologists
- Nurse Practitioners
- Ophthalmic Medical Technologists
- Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric
- Orthopedic Surgeons, Except Pediatric
- Orthoptists
- Pediatric Surgeons
- Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Physicians
- Physician Assistants
- Physicians, Pathologists
- Podiatrists
- Registered Nurses
- Sports Medicine Physicians
- Urologists
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Diagnose health conditions or disorders”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Diagnose neural or psychological disorders | 3 |
| Diagnose dental conditions | 2 |
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.