Treat patients using physical therapy techniques
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 | 6 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 6 occupations that perform it.
- Perform a series of manual adjustments to the spine or other articulations of the body to correct the musculoskeletal system.
- Administer manual exercises, massage, or traction to help relieve pain, increase patient strength, or decrease or prevent deformity or crippling.
- Apply heat or cold therapy to patients using materials, such as heat pads, hydrocollator packs, warm compresses, cold compresses, heat lamps, or vapor coolants.
- Perform mobilizations and high-velocity adjustments to joints or soft tissues, using principles of massage, stretching, or resistance.
- Apply compresses, ice bags, or hot water bottles.
- Care for athletic injuries, using physical therapy equipment, techniques, or medication.
- Administer treatment involving application of physical agents, using equipment, moist packs, ultraviolet or infrared lamps, or ultrasound machines.
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
6 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Administer therapeutic treatments”. 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.