Jobs / Healthcare
Can agents do healthcare work?
Clinical and technical healthcare work, and healthcare support.
- US jobs
- 17,725,580 (11.4% of employment)
- Typical wage
- $76K a year (employment-weighted mean of occupation medians)
- Occupations
- 116 in O*NET 31.0
- Evidence
- 3 benchmarks from 3 institutions
Task level
Partial · thin evidence (fewer than 2 independent institutions)
One benchmark, from early 2025. On Stanford's MedAgentBench, where agents do clinical tasks in a simulated electronic health record, the best recorded model completes 69.7% of tasks (Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2). It has no maintained leaderboard, so newer models are not measured. No benchmark in our collection tests work with patients.
Evidence: MedAgentBench — by Stanford University. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Project level
Partial
Only adjacent evidence. GDPval includes nurses among its 44 occupations. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all occupations. No benchmark in our collection tests clinical work over days, such as managing a patient's care.
Evidence: GDPval, GDPval-AA — by Artificial Analysis and OpenAI. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Benchmarks for this work
Also relevant
These benchmarks cover part of this family's work.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
What we do not know
- Benchmarks measure tasks, not whole jobs. A job is a bundle of tasks, judgment, and relationships.
- Capability is not adoption. A task that agents can do in a benchmark may still be done by people at work.
- Most results come from single runs. Reliability over many runs is often unknown.
Occupations in this family
Sorted by US employment (BLS OEWS May 2025). O*NET sub-occupations share the employment figure of their SOC group.
How to cite
Credit the original work first: the benchmarks listed on this page, and their institutions.
Then, if you used this page:
Can Agents Work. "Can agents do healthcare work?." https://canagentswork.com/jobs/healthcare/ (accessed 2026-09-24). CC BY 4.0.@misc{caw-jobs-healthcare,
title = {{Can agents do healthcare work?}},
author = {{Can Agents Work}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://canagentswork.com/jobs/healthcare/}},
note = {Accessed 2026-09-24. CC BY 4.0}
}