Manage healthcare operations
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The reporting and paperwork around management automate well. Directing, developing and evaluating people does not, and people do not accept it when it is attempted on them.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Managing, training and developing people |
| Jobs that do it | 15 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Enterprise platforms |
| O*NET activity | Guiding, Directing, and Motivating Subordinates (4.A.4.b.4) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 15 occupations that perform it.
- Prepare and administer budgets for food, equipment, and supplies.
- Manage pharmacy operations, hiring or supervising staff, performing administrative duties, or buying or selling non-pharmaceutical merchandise.
- Perform administrative duties, such as hiring employees, ordering supplies, or keeping records.
- Direct the overall operations of animal hospitals, clinics, or mobile services to farms.
- Perform administrative or managerial functions, such as taking responsibility for a unit's staff, budget, planning, or long-range goals.
- Lead nursing department implementation of, or compliance with, regulatory or accreditation processes.
- Perform administrative tasks, such as managing office functions and finances.
- Manage medical laboratories.
- Formulate plans and procedures for nuclear medicine departments.
- Direct the operations of short stay or specialty units.
- Direct public health education programs dealing with topics such as preventable diseases, injuries, nutrition, food service sanitation, water supply safety, sewage and waste disposal, insect control, and immunizations.
- Manage surgery services, including planning, scheduling and coordination, determination of procedures, or procurement of supplies and equipment.
- Perform supervisory duties, such as developing departmental operating budget, coordinating purchases of supplies or equipment, or preparing work schedules.
- Manage the department or supervise clerical workers, directing or controlling activities of personnel in the medical records department.
- Manage quantity food service departments or clinical and community nutrition services.
- Chair nursing departments or committees.
- Develop and supervise hearing screening programs.
- Direct or manage prevention programs in specialty areas such as aerospace, occupational, infectious disease, and environmental medicine.
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. The reporting and paperwork around management run on whatever you already use for documents, and the part that is actually managing people does not automate at any price.
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.
Enterprise platforms
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
15 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Audiologists
- Clinical Nurse Specialists
- Dietitians and Nutritionists
- Health Information Technologists and Medical Registrars
- Hospitalists
- Orthopedic Surgeons, Except Pediatric
- Pediatric Surgeons
- Pharmacists
- Physicians, Pathologists
- Podiatrists
- Preventive Medicine Physicians
- Radiologic Technologists and Technicians
- Radiologists
- Registered Nurses
- Veterinarians
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Direct organizational operations, activities, or 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.