UK AI Exposure · Administrative and secretarial occupations
Medical secretaries
Medical secretaries deal with correspondence, make appointments and handle patients’ queries file and maintain medical and other records transcribe notes and dictation and perform other clerical tasks in hospitals/surgeries and other medical establishments.
- Employees (UK)
- 43k
- Median annual pay
- £24,071
- Exposure score ?
- 6.0/10 High direct 6.0 · with tools 9.7
- Wage exposure
- £621m
Higher exposure than 97% of the 379 UK occupations we scored.
What this score means
Most of the routine task inventory in this role can already be done by a capable LLM. That doesn't mean the role disappears - it means the shape changes, and one person can credibly do the work of several.
If you're in this role, here's what to do now
Stop doing anything an LLM can do. Your edge is judgment, relationships, taste, and the parts of the work that require you to be in the room. The operators who notice this first and redesign their workflow around it will be paid for those things; the ones who cling to the old task list will compete against AI at AI's prices.
The tasks in this role, ranked by AI exposure
Below are the real tasks O*NET records for this occupation, sorted highest exposure first. "AI can do this" means a language model can already handle the task directly. "AI can help" means an LLM can assist but not replace. "Human work" means today's AI doesn't touch it. Importance is O*NET's 1–5 rating of how central each task is to the role.
12 of 15 tasks in this role are things an AI can already do today. Task list mapped via O*NET "Medical Transcriptionists" (31-9094.00).
Return dictated reports in printed or electronic form for physician's review, signature, and corrections and for inclusion in patients' medical records.
Produce medical reports, correspondence, records, patient-care information, statistics, medical research, and administrative material.
Identify mistakes in reports and check with doctors to obtain the correct information.
Review and edit transcribed reports or dictated material for spelling, grammar, clarity, consistency, and proper medical terminology.
Transcribe dictation for a variety of medical reports, such as patient histories, physical examinations, emergency room visits, operations, chart reviews, consultation, or discharge summaries.
Distinguish between homonyms and recognize inconsistencies and mistakes in medical terms, referring to dictionaries, drug references, and other sources on anatomy, physiology, and medicine.
Translate medical jargon and abbreviations into their expanded forms to ensure the accuracy of patient and health care facility records.
Perform data entry and data retrieval services, providing data for inclusion in medical records and for transmission to physicians.
Take dictation using shorthand, a stenotype machine, or headsets and transcribing machines.
Answer inquiries concerning the progress of medical cases, within the limits of confidentiality laws.
Perform a variety of clerical and office tasks, such as handling incoming and outgoing mail, completing and submitting insurance claims, typing, filing, or operating office machines.
Decide which information should be included or excluded in reports.
Set up and maintain medical files and databases, including records such as x-ray, lab, and procedure reports, medical histories, diagnostic workups, admission and discharge summaries, and clinical resumes.
Receive patients, schedule appointments, and maintain patient records.
Receive and screen telephone calls and visitors.
Where a project with Alex usually starts for this role
These are the highest-importance tasks in this role that a language model can already handle directly. In a typical engagement the first wins come from building workflows around these, so they stop eating your team's time.
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Return dictated reports in printed or electronic form for physician's review, signature, and corrections and for inclusion in patients' medical records.
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Produce medical reports, correspondence, records, patient-care information, statistics, medical research, and administrative material.
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Identify mistakes in reports and check with doctors to obtain the correct information.
Every role has three or four wedges like these. Finding them takes an hour. Turning them into a workflow your team actually uses takes a few days. Talk to Alex about a project →
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Methodology
This role's exposure score comes from Eloundou et al's 2023 GPT task labels, aggregated by O*NET importance within each O*NET-SOC code, then bridged to UK SOC 2020 via ISCO-08 (ONS Vol 2 coding index) and US SOC 2010 (BLS crosswalk). Employment and median pay come from ONS ASHE Table 14.7a, 2025 provisional. ASHE covers employees only, so self-employed workers are not counted.
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