Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1214.00
Emergency Medicine Physicians
Make immediate medical decisions and act to prevent death or further disability. Provide immediate recognition, evaluation, care, stabilization, and disposition of patients. May direct emergency medical staff in an emergency department.
- US jobs
- 32,880
- Median wage
- $335,550 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of emergency medicine physicians?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Healthcare:
- Task levelPartialOne 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.
- Project levelPartialOnly 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.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in healthcare, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Select, request, perform, or interpret diagnostic procedures, such as laboratory tests, electrocardiograms, emergency ultrasounds, and radiographs.
- Evaluate patients' vital signs or laboratory data to determine emergency intervention needs and priority of treatment.
- Perform emergency resuscitations on patients.
- Stabilize patients in critical condition.
- Perform such medical procedures as emergent cricothyrotomy, endotracheal intubation, and emergency thoracotomy.
- Analyze records, examination information, or test results to diagnose medical conditions.
- Consult with hospitalists and other professionals, such as social workers, regarding patients' hospital admission, continued observation, transition of care, or discharge.
- Conduct primary patient assessments that include information from prior medical care.
- Communicate likely outcomes of medical diseases or traumatic conditions to patients or their representatives.
- Monitor patients' conditions, and reevaluate treatments, as necessary.
- Direct and coordinate activities of nurses, assistants, specialists, residents, and other medical staff.
- Select and prescribe medications to address patient needs.
Other job titles for this occupation (23)
Attending Emergency Physician · Attending Physician · Emergency MD (Emergency Medicine Doctor) · Emergency Medicine Physician (EM Physician) · Emergency Physician · MD (Medical Doctor) · Physician · Critical Care Intensivist · Critical Care Intensivist Physician · Critical Care Physician · Disaster Medicine Physician · Emergency Department Doctor (ED Doctor) · Emergency Department Physician (ED Physician) · Emergency Doctor · Emergency Medicine Specialist · ER Doctor (Emergency Room Doctor) · ER Physician (Emergency Room Physician) · Intensivist · Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician · Pulmonary Critical Care Physician · Trauma Doctor · Urgent Care Physician · Wound Care Physician