Treat medical emergencies
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 | 19 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 19 occupations that perform it.
- Provide emergency treatment of facial injuries including facial lacerations, intra-oral lacerations, and fractured facial bones.
- Respond to emergency situations by providing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), basic cardiac life support (BLS), advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), or pediatric advanced life support (PALS).
- Provide emergency care, such as artificial respiration, external cardiac massage, or assistance with cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
- Provide emergency or other appropriate medical care to participants with symptoms or signs of physical distress.
- Identify and respond to emergency physical or mental health situations.
- Perform physical examinations, make tentative diagnoses, and treat patients en route to hospitals or at disaster site triage centers.
- Perform emergency medical procedures, such as basic cardiac life support (BLS), advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), and other condition-stabilizing interventions.
- Monitor patients for changes in status and indications of conditions such as sepsis or shock and institute appropriate interventions.
- Respond to emergency situations by providing airway management, administering emergency fluids or drugs, or using basic or advanced cardiac life support techniques.
- Initiate emergency interventions to stabilize patients.
- Diagnose or treat complex, unstable, comorbid, episodic, or emergency conditions in collaboration with other health care providers as necessary.
- Administer emergency cardiac care for life-threatening heart problems, such as cardiac arrest and heart attack.
- Perform emergency resuscitations on patients.
- Perform medical procedures, such as administering oxygen, inserting and removing airways, taking vital signs, or giving emergency treatment, such as first aid or cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
- Administer first aid treatment or life support care to sick or injured persons in prehospital settings.
- Administer emergency first aid, such as performing emergency resuscitation or other life saving procedures.
- Provide necessary medical care for infants at birth, including emergency care such as resuscitation.
- Administer first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation to injured persons or provide emergency medical care such as basic or advanced life support.
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
19 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Acute Care Nurses
- Anesthesiologist Assistants
- Cardiologists
- Critical Care Nurses
- Diagnostic Medical Sonographers
- Emergency Medical Technicians
- Emergency Medicine Physicians
- Exercise Physiologists
- Firefighters
- Midwives
- Music Therapists
- Nurse Anesthetists
- Nurse Midwives
- Nurse Practitioners
- Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
- Paramedics
- Registered Nurses
- Respiratory Therapists
- Veterinary Technologists and Technicians
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Administer emergency medical treatment”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Administer first aid | 11 |
| Implement advanced life support techniques | 8 |
| Provide first aid or rescue assistance in emergencies | 6 |
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.