EXPOSED
This is a catch-all bucket — ophthalmic techs, EEG and neurodiagnostic techs, hearing aid specialists, orthopedic and dialysis-adjacent techs, sleep and perfusion assistants — and the modal worker spends most of the shift physically positioning patients, attaching electrodes or probes, calibrating equipment, and running protocol-driven tests. That hands-on layer is safe from software and from today's robotics; what is exposed is the interpretation, documentation, and reporting layer, where AI already reads waveforms, flags abnormalities, and drafts the tech note. Most of these roles carry certification or state registration rather than an independent license with personal liability, so the regulatory shield is thin and varies by state and specialty.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+5.2% 178,800 → 188,100 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +5.2% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 54/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~13,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
RegistrarAngiographerAudiometristCase ManagerPerfusionistCare NavigatorAdmitting ClerkPatient PartnerClinical LiaisonDrug CoordinatorEncephalographerPatient AdvocatePolysomnographerSleep TechnicianIntake SpecialistPatient NavigatorPatient RegistrarMedical ConsultantMedical TechnicianSleep TechnologistDialysis TechnicianFirst-Aid AttendantHospital TechnicianPatient Coordinator
The BLS uses Health Technologists and Technicians, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: judgment & accountability .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier A 12 reflects the split inside the shift: applying a 21-lead EEG montage to a squirming pediatric patient, seating a patient at a slit lamp, or troubleshooting a dialysis machine alarm is not going anywhere, but the parts that fill your charting hours — waveform pre-reads, abnormality flagging, tonometry and visual field capture, sleep-study epoch scoring, hearing-threshold plotting — are already largely machine-generated, which is why this sits mid-band rather than at 16.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments 16 is earned by the fact that essentially nothing you do happens without the patient in front of you: measuring head circumference and marking scalp with collodion, holding a probe steady during an unpredictable movement, physically taking hearing-aid ear impressions, repositioning limbs for orthopedic casting — all in exam rooms, bedsides and ICUs where lighting, patient cooperation and anatomy vary every time, which no current robot handles.
Certification preferred, not legally required 8 rather than 14 because ABRET, JCAHPO, IBHRE or state hearing-aid dispenser registration are usually the ceiling — real credentials with exams and CEUs, but the neurologist, ophthalmologist or nephrologist signs the interpretation and carries the malpractice exposure, and in several states parts of this bucket can be trained on the job with no credential at all.
Meaningful discretion 8 fits because you make real in-the-moment calls — recognizing artifact versus true epileptiform discharge and re-prepping the electrode, aborting a test when a patient's vitals shift, deciding a reading is unusable and repeating it — but the protocol dictates the montage, the sequence and the thresholds, and the diagnostic call and treatment decision belong to the supervising physician.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (12/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (8/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (10/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (8/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 26 of this occupation's 54 points (48%).
Embodiment (16/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 72/100 — SAFE.
Task-mix shift in the specialties that genuinely have two tiers: if AI absorbs waveform screening and note drafting, the remaining shift is artifact discrimination, electrode impedance troubleshooting, patient-state judgment (is this a seizure or is the patient scratching), and provocation-test decisions during a live study. Watch for job postings that drop 'preliminary interpretation' and add 'protocol modification authority'.
State-level conversion of voluntary certification into mandatory licensure for specific sub-specialties, with the tech named as the signing party on the raw study record. Neurodiagnostics is the live example: ABRET-credentialed EEG techs are already required by some state Medicaid and Joint Commission-surveyed epilepsy monitoring units, and several states (e.g. New Jersey, Louisiana bills on polysomnographic technologist licensure) have moved sleep techs from registration to license. A CMS condition-of-participation requiring a licensed technologist attestation that the AI-flagged waveform matches the patient's recorded electrode placement would put personal accountability on the tech for study integrity.
Formal in-study escalation authority written into hospital protocol — e.g. AASM or ABRET practice standards granting the technologist standing authority to abort or modify a titration, terminate an evoked-potential study, or call a rapid response without waiting for physician contact. This exists informally in most sleep labs and EMUs; codifying it as documented, auditable decision ownership is the change.
Dialysis: an ESRD Conditions for Coverage amendment requiring a certified technician to be the identified accountable operator for machine parameter changes rather than the supervising nurse. CMS already mandates state certification for dialysis techs where a state program exists; extending named-operator liability to AI-suggested UF rate or conductivity adjustments is a narrow, recognizable rule change.
Intraoperative neuromonitoring is the sub-bucket where alarm calls are already consequential and litigated (surgeons have been sued over IONM alerts not relayed). If accreditation requires an on-site credentialed technologist to own the alert decision rather than a remote physician oversight-reader model, accountability concentrates in the role.
The limit. Trust premium has no plausible route: patients do not select or pay extra for a specific EEG or ophthalmic tech, and purchasing is institutional. Embodiment is already near ceiling at 16 and can only fall. Because this is a catch-all SOC, every liability lever is sub-specialty specific — licensure gains for IONM or sleep techs do not lift ophthalmic assistants or hearing aid fitters, so the aggregate score for the bucket will move far less than any one specialty's.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 12,400 | $61,440 +22% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 9,940 | $59,210 +18% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 5,000 | $49,370 -2% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 4,400 | $49,870 -1% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 4,010 | $49,500 -2% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 3,630 | $55,530 +10% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 3,590 | $54,290 +8% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 3,540 | $50,240 +0% |
| Kennewick-Richland, WA | 420 | $105,650 +110% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 1,330 | $81,170 +61% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 3,070 | $71,360 +42% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 54. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.