Operate on patients to treat conditions
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 | 18 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 18 occupations that perform it.
- Perform oral or periodontal surgery on the jaw or mouth.
- Perform surgery to prepare the mouth for dental implants and to aid in the regeneration of deficient bone and gum tissues.
- Surgically treat conditions such as corns, calluses, ingrown nails, tumors, shortened tendons, bunions, cysts, or abscesses.
- Treat sick or injured animals by prescribing medication, setting bones, dressing wounds, or performing surgery.
- Perform minimally invasive surgical procedures, such as implanting pacemakers and defibrillators.
- Perform skin surgery to improve appearance, make early diagnoses, or control diseases such as skin cancer.
- Perform such medical procedures as emergent cricothyrotomy, endotracheal intubation, and emergency thoracotomy.
- Operate on patients to remove, repair, or improve functioning of diseased or injured body parts and systems.
- Perform cesarean sections or other surgical procedures as needed to preserve patients' health and deliver babies safely.
- Perform interventional procedures such as image-guided biopsy, percutaneous transluminal angioplasty, transhepatic biliary drainage, or nephrostomy catheter placement.
- Perform abdominal, pelvic, or retroperitoneal surgeries.
- Perform laser surgeries to alter, remove, reshape, or replace ocular tissue.
- Diagnose bodily disorders and orthopedic conditions, and provide treatments, such as medicines and surgeries, in clinics, hospital wards, or operating rooms.
- Operate on fetuses, infants, children, and adolescents to correct deformities, repair injuries, prevent and treat diseases, or improve or restore patients' functions.
- Perform minor surgical procedures, such as removing warts, moles, or cysts, sampling tissues for skin cancer or lipomas, and applying or removing sutures.
- Apply sutures, staples, clips, or other materials to close skin, facia, or subcutaneous wound layers.
- Suture perineal lacerations.
- Remove diseased tissue, using surgical instruments.
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
18 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Cardiologists
- Dentists, General
- Dermatologists
- Emergency Medicine Physicians
- General Internal Medicine Physicians
- Midwives
- Naturopathic Physicians
- Obstetricians and Gynecologists
- Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric
- Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
- Orthopedic Surgeons, Except Pediatric
- Pediatric Surgeons
- Pediatricians, General
- Podiatrists
- Radiologists
- Surgical Assistants
- Urologists
- Veterinarians
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Treat injuries, illnesses, or diseases”. 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.