AI exposure: Emergency Medical Technicians
Assess injuries and illnesses and administer basic emergency medical care. May transport injured or sick persons to medical facilities.
Reading this score
computedAt 12.8% of weighted task load, Emergency Medical Technicians sits at the 20th percentile, below the point where a job's centre of gravity has moved. 66.7% of what this role does is untouched, meaning current systems cannot produce that work at all, whatever the commercial incentive.
What holds the line here is verification cost. Across this occupation's 12 tasks it averages 2.56 out of 3, the highest of the five friction dimensions. In plain terms, checking the output costs more than producing it. Where an undetected error is expensive, dangerous or irreversible, the economics change. Someone has to verify the work, and verifying can cost as much as doing it. This is the friction most likely to fall as tools for checking improve.
The most exposed thing this job does is Assess nature and extent of illness or injury to establish and prioritize medical procedures, at 30.0%. The least is Perform emergency diagnostic and treatment procedures, at 0.0%. A gap of 30.0% between two parts of the same job is the reason this index publishes at task level. An occupation-wide number would have hidden both.
Within healthcare practitioner and technical occupations, this one is less exposed than the median of 18.5% across the group's 89 roles, with 71 scoring higher. Being in an exposed family does not make a particular job exposed, and the reverse holds too.
What would move this score. Of 12 tasks, 1 are currently banded exposed, 4 assisted and 7 untouched. For that distribution to shift materially would take robotics cheap and reliable enough to deploy at scale, not a better language model. The score is re-computed every quarter against a fresh capability reference, and the change is published rather than quietly applied.
Where the score comes from
judgedEvery task is scored through the standardised work activities it maps to. These are this occupation’s averages on the six rubric dimensions. Capability is what AI can do; the other five are what stands in the way.
| Dimension | Mean | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | 1.33 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 1.74 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 1.89 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 2.26 | 0-3 |
| Context | 1.62 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 2.56 | 0-3 |
Task by task
12 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assess nature and extent of illness or injury to establish and prioritize medical procedures. | 30.0% | 45.0% | 25.0% | – | assisted |
| Attend training classes to maintain certification licensure, keep abreast of new developments in the field, or maintain existing knowledge. | 30.0% | 20.0% | 50.0% | – | exposed |
| Observe, record, and report to physician the patient's condition or injury, the treatment provided, and reactions to drugs or treatment. | 28.3% | 46.7% | 25.0% | – | assisted |
| Communicate with dispatchers or treatment center personnel to provide information about situation, to arrange reception of survivors, or to receive instructions for further treatment. | 25.0% | 50.0% | 25.0% | – | assisted |
| Coordinate work with other emergency medical team members or police or fire department personnel. | 13.3% | 36.7% | 50.0% | – | assisted |
| Maintain vehicles and medical and communication equipment, and replenish first aid equipment and supplies. | 10.8% | 14.2% | 75.0% | – | untouched |
| Comfort and reassure patients. | 8.3% | 16.7% | 75.0% | – | untouched |
| Drive mobile intensive care unit to specified location, following instructions from emergency medical dispatcher. | 8.3% | 16.7% | 75.0% | – | untouched |
| Administer first aid treatment or life support care to sick or injured persons in prehospital settings. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | – | untouched |
| Decontaminate ambulance interior following treatment of patient with infectious disease, and report case to proper authorities. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | – | untouched |
| Immobilize patient for placement on stretcher and ambulance transport, using backboard or other spinal immobilization device. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | – | untouched |
| Perform emergency diagnostic and treatment procedures, such as stomach suction, airway management, or heart monitoring, during ambulance ride. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | – | untouched |
Task text and importance ratings sourced from O*NET 31.0. Shares computed. The occupation score is the importance-weighted mean. 12 task(s) lacked a usable O*NET weight and are shown but excluded from the weighting.
Occupations either side of this one
The four closest scores in the same occupational family, then the four closest anywhere in the index.
Read this carefully. Exposure is not displacement. A high score means current AI systems can produce this work, not that anyone will stop paying a person to do it. Adoption depends on economics, regulation and inertia that this index deliberately does not model. How the score is built.
What this means in practice
Most of this work is not reachable by current systems, so the immediate pressure is on the administrative edges of the role rather than its core: the scheduling, the reporting, the written records. That is where time is recovered.