Provide health and wellness advice to patients, program participants, or caregivers
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
Software drafts well and sends at volume, and vertical support agents now resolve a large share of inbound questions end to end. What does not transfer is the relationship, and the judgment about when a message should not be sent at all.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Routine communication and explanation |
| Jobs that do it | 25 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Providing Consultation and Advice to Others (4.A.4.b.6) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 25 occupations that perform it.
- Provide individual support or counseling in general wellness or nutrition.
- Counsel patients about nutrition, exercise, sleeping habits, stress management, or other matters.
- Advise patients and their families on nutritional principles, dietary plans, diet modifications, and food selection and preparation.
- Instruct and counsel patients about prescribed therapeutic regimens, normal growth and development, family planning, emotional problems of daily living, and health maintenance.
- Recommend changes in patients' work or living environments, consistent with their needs and capabilities.
- Counsel and encourage patients to develop leisure activities.
- Recommend methods to increase lifestyle physical activity.
- Advise animal owners regarding sanitary measures, feeding, general care, medical conditions, or treatment options.
- Educate patients and family members regarding prenatal, intrapartum, postpartum, newborn, or interconception care.
- Recommend interventions to modify behavior associated with health risks.
- Instruct individuals and groups on ways to preserve health and prevent disease.
- Advise patients and community members concerning diet, activity, hygiene, or disease prevention.
- Advise patients and community members concerning diet, activity, hygiene, and disease prevention.
- Advise patients, parents or guardians, and community members concerning diet, activity, hygiene, and disease prevention.
- Provide education and counseling on illness and injury prevention.
- Educate patients about maintenance and promotion of healthy vision.
- Provide clinical services or health education to improve and maintain the oral health of patients or the general public.
- Advise patients about therapeutic exercise and nutritional medicine regimens.
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 routine communication and explanation, and what it costs.
Drafting replies costs nothing beyond the assistant you already pay for. Only move to a support agent billed per resolution once the inbound volume is large enough that the per-resolution price beats the hour it takes you.
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.
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
25 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Anesthesiologists
- Animal Caretakers
- Cardiologists
- Chiropractors
- Dental Hygienists
- Dietetic Technicians
- Dietitians and Nutritionists
- Exercise Physiologists
- Family Medicine Physicians
- Fitness and Wellness Coordinators
- General Internal Medicine Physicians
- Medical Dosimetrists
- Midwives
- Naturopathic Physicians
- Nurse Midwives
- Nurse Practitioners
- Obstetricians and Gynecologists
- Occupational Therapists
- Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric
- Pediatricians, General
- Physician Assistants
- Recreational Therapists
- Sports Medicine Physicians
- Veterinarians
- Veterinary Technologists and Technicians
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Advise patients or clients on medical issues”. 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.