Jobs / Healthcare / 29-2072.00
Medical Records Specialists
Compile, process, and maintain medical records of hospital and clinic patients in a manner consistent with medical, administrative, ethical, legal, and regulatory requirements of the healthcare system. Classify medical and healthcare concepts, including diagnosis, procedures, medical services, and equipment, into the healthcare industry's numerical coding system. Includes medical coders.
- US jobs
- 194,720
- Median wage
- $51,140 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of medical records specialists?
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 this occupation
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.
- Protect the security of medical records to ensure that confidentiality is maintained.
- Review records for completeness, accuracy, and compliance with regulations.
- Scan patients' health records into electronic formats.
- Release information to persons or agencies according to regulations.
- Enter data, such as demographic characteristics, history and extent of disease, diagnostic procedures, or treatment into computer.
- Maintain or operate a variety of health record indexes or storage and retrieval systems to collect, classify, store, or analyze information.
- Process patient admission or discharge documents.
- Retrieve patient medical records for physicians, technicians, or other medical personnel.
- Resolve or clarify codes or diagnoses with conflicting, missing, or unclear information by consulting with doctors or others or by participating in the coding team's regular meetings.
- Compile and maintain patients' medical records to document condition and treatment and to provide data for research or cost control and care improvement efforts.
- Identify, compile, abstract, and code patient data, using standard classification systems.
- Assign the patient to diagnosis-related groups (DRGs), using appropriate computer software.
Other job titles for this occupation (49)
Coder · Health Information Clerk · Health Information Specialist · Health Information Technician (Health Information Tech) · Health Records Specialist · HIM Clerk (Health Information Management Clerk) · Medical Coder · Medical Records Clerk · Medical Records Technician (Medical Records Tech) · RHIT (Registered Health Information Technician) · Certified Coding Specialist · Certified Medical Coder · Certified Professional Coder (CPC) · Clinical Documentation Specialist · Coding Consultant · Coding Specialist · Disability Rater · EHR Specialist (Electronic Health Records Specialist) · Fee Coder · Health Informatics Specialist · Health Information Coder · Health Records Technician (Health Records Tech) · Health Services Information Specialist · HIM Hospital Coder (Health Information Management Hospital Coder) · HIM Inpatient Coding Auditor (Health Information Management Inpatient Coding Auditor) · HIM Tech (Health Information Management Technician) · Inpatient Coder · Insurance Coder · Medical Administrative Specialist · Medical Administrative Technician (Medical Administrative Tech) · Medical Bill Coder · Medical Biller · Medical Billing Coder · Medical Billing Specialist · Medical Coding Specialist · Medical Coding Technician (Medical Coding Tech) · Medical Insurance Coder · Medical Insurance Coding Specialist · Medical Office Coordinator · Medical Office Specialist · Medical Office Technician (Medical Office Tech) · Medical Records Assistant · Medical Records Coder · Medical Records Custodian · Medical Reimbursement Specialist · Outpatient Coder · Patient Administration Specialist · ROI Medical Records Specialist (Release of Information Medical Records Specialist) · ROI Specialist (Release of Information Specialist)