Evaluate patient functioning, capabilities, or health
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 | 17 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 17 occupations that perform it.
- Conduct assessments of patients' risk for harm to self or others.
- Assess patients for risk of suicide attempts.
- Provide clinical services to clients, such as assessing psychological problems and conducting psychotherapy.
- Test and evaluate patients' physical and mental abilities and analyze medical data to determine realistic rehabilitation goals for patients.
- Assess clients' functioning in areas such as vision, orientation and mobility skills, social and emotional issues, cognition, physical abilities, and personal goals.
- Assess physical performance requirements to aid in the development of individualized recovery or rehabilitation exercise programs.
- Assess client functioning levels, strengths, and areas of need in terms of perceptual, sensory, affective, communicative, musical, physical, cognitive, social, spiritual, or other abilities.
- Assess the impact of illnesses or injuries on patients' health, function, growth, development, nutrition, sleep, rest, quality of life, or family, social and educational relationships.
- Assess patients' mental and physical status, based on the presenting symptoms and complaints.
- Assess patients' psychosocial status and needs, including areas such as sleep patterns, anxiety, grief, anger, and support systems.
- Monitor or evaluate medical conditions of patients in collaboration with other health care professionals.
- Conduct primary patient assessments that include information from prior medical care.
- Observe and evaluate athletes' mental well-being.
- Conduct nutritional assessments of individuals, including obtaining and evaluating individuals' dietary histories, to plan nutritional programs.
- Evaluate athletes' readiness to play and provide participation clearances when necessary and warranted.
- Assess patients' psychological or emotional needs, such as those relating to stress, fear of test results, financial issues, and marital conflicts to make referral recommendations or assist patients in managing test outcomes.
- Conduct ongoing prenatal health assessments, tracking changes in physical and emotional health.
- Examine and evaluate athletes prior to participation in sports activities to determine level of physical fitness or predisposition to injuries.
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
17 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
- Athletic Trainers
- Clinical and Counseling Psychologists
- Clinical Nurse Specialists
- Critical Care Nurses
- Dietetic Technicians
- Emergency Medicine Physicians
- Exercise Physiologists
- Genetic Counselors
- Low Vision Therapists, Orientation and Mobility Specialists, and Vision Rehabilitation Therapists
- Mental Health Counselors
- Midwives
- Music Therapists
- Occupational Therapists
- Psychology Teachers, Postsecondary
- Sports Medicine Physicians
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.