Refer clients to community or social service programs
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can propose the plan, chase the replies and keep the record current. To actually change anything it needs write access to a calendar or work system, and a person still owns the tradeoffs when two plans collide.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Scheduling, planning and resource control |
| Jobs that do it | 11 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Tools and auth, Builders |
| 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 11 occupations that perform it.
- Refer clients to social service or community resources for needs beyond those of credit or debt counseling.
- Provide clients or family members with information about addiction issues and about available services or programs, making appropriate referrals when necessary.
- Assess needs for assistance, such as rehabilitation, financial aid, or additional vocational training, and refer clients to the appropriate services.
- Determine whether clients should be counseled or referred to other specialists in such fields as medicine, psychiatry, or legal aid.
- Refer patients, clients, or family members to community resources or to specialists as necessary.
- Refer clients to community resources for services, such as job placement, debt counseling, legal aid, housing, medical treatment, or financial assistance, and provide concrete information, such as where to go and how to apply.
- Refer patient, client, or family to community resources to assist in recovery from mental or physical illness and to provide access to services such as financial assistance, legal aid, housing, job placement or education.
- Refer patient, client, or family to community resources for housing or treatment to assist in recovery from mental or physical illness, following through to ensure service efficacy.
- Provide information or refer individuals to public or private agencies or community services for assistance.
- Refer community members to needed health services.
- Refer people to community support services, psychologists, or doctors.
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 scheduling, planning and resource control, and what it costs.
Scheduling is a connector problem rather than an intelligence one, and $9 a month of Make covers both the calendar and the chasing. An agent platform priced per seat adds nothing you would notice here.
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
11 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Child, Family, and School Social Workers
- Clergy
- Community Health Workers
- Credit Counselors
- Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
- Healthcare Social Workers
- Marriage and Family Therapists
- Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers
- Mental Health Counselors
- Social and Human Service Assistants
- Substance Abuse and Behavioral Disorder Counselors
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Assist others to access additional services or resources”. 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.