Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1299.02
Orthoptists
Diagnose and treat visual system disorders such as binocular vision and eye movement impairments.
- US jobs
- 28,630 (SOC 29-1299 group, "Healthcare Diagnosing or Treating Practitioners, All Other")
- Median wage
- $115,210 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of orthoptists?
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 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.
- Evaluate, diagnose, or treat disorders of the visual system with an emphasis on binocular vision or abnormal eye movements.
- Examine patients with problems related to ocular motility, binocular vision, amblyopia, or strabismus.
- Perform diagnostic tests or measurements, such as motor testing, visual acuity testing, lensometry, retinoscopy, and color vision testing.
- Provide nonsurgical interventions, including corrective lenses, patches, drops, fusion exercises, or stereograms, to treat conditions such as strabismus, heterophoria, and convergence insufficiency.
- Develop nonsurgical treatment plans for patients with conditions such as strabismus, nystagmus, and other visual disorders.
- Provide instructions to patients or family members concerning diagnoses or treatment plans.
- Interpret clinical or diagnostic test results.
- Refer patients to ophthalmic surgeons or other physicians.
- Develop or use special test and communication techniques to facilitate diagnosis and treatment of children or patients with disabilities.
- Provide training related to clinical methods or orthoptics to students, resident physicians, or other health professionals.
- Collaborate with ophthalmologists, optometrists, or other specialists in the diagnosis, treatment, or management of conditions such as glaucoma, cataracts, and retinal diseases.
- Prepare diagnostic or treatment reports for other medical practitioners or therapists.
Other job titles for this occupation (2)
Clinical Orthoptist (CO) · CO (Certified Orthoptist)