Healthcare is usually offered as the safe harbour. It is human work, it is caring work, it cannot be done by a machine. The index broadly agrees: both healthcare groups sit well below the all-occupation median.
Where it disagrees is on the internal ordering.
| Group | Occupations | Median exposed share |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare practitioners and technical | 89 | 18.5% |
| Healthcare support | 19 | 11.9% |
The practitioners, meaning the physicians, the nurses, the pharmacists, the diagnostic specialists, carry more exposed task load than the aides, orderlies, assistants and technicians who support them.
The reason is embodiment, and it cuts the opposite way to intuition
Healthcare support work is overwhelmingly physical and present. Assisting patients with hygiene and daily activities. Positioning patients for examination. Feeding patients. Transferring people between beds and chairs. In our rubric these carry the maximum embodiment rating and the maximum presence rating, and capability sits at zero, because no current system can do any of it.
They are also, notably, among the lowest paid occupations in the economy. The protection is real and it is not being rewarded.
Practitioner work contains a great deal of that too, and that is why the group still scores low in absolute terms. But it also contains the documenting, the analysing of test results, the interpreting of data, the treatment planning, the coding and the correspondence. That portion is symbolic, and symbolic work is what these systems produce.
Two cautions specific to this reading
First, the practitioner group is extremely internally varied. It contains radiologists at 28.0% and it contains surgeons whose core work is unreachable. A group median across 89 occupations conceals more than it reveals here, which is why every occupation has its own page.
Second, accountability is doing heavy work in this group and it does not appear in the headline number. Many practitioner tasks rate 3 out of 3 on accountability, meaning a licensed person must sign the output. Those tasks are held in the assisted band rather than the exposed one. Remove the licensure requirement and the practitioner median would move sharply. Nothing in current AI capability removes it.
What follows
The useful conclusion is not that healthcare support workers are safer than doctors in any career sense. It is narrower and more specific: within healthcare, the work current systems can reach is the paperwork, the analysis and the correspondence, and that work is distributed toward the licensed end of the profession rather than away from it.
If the administrative load in clinical work is the most exposed thing in healthcare, and the index says clearly that it is, then the first-order effect of these systems in medicine is likely to be a change in how clinicians spend their day rather than a change in how many of them there are.
Figures from release v2026.Q3, built on O*NET 31.0. Group medians are computed across the occupations in each SOC major group. Exposure is not displacement: see the methodology page.