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arXiv · 2605.02709

An Empirical Study of Agent Skills for Healthcare: Practice, Gaps, and Governance

Gelei Xu·Ningzhi Tang·Xueyang Li·Toby Jia-Jun Li·Zhi Zheng·Wei Jin·Yiyu Shi
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Abstract

Healthcare automation is shaped by local procedures and organizational constraints, so agent capabilities rarely transfer unchanged across settings. Agent skills, self-contained directories that package reusable procedures for AI agents, are emerging as a procedural layer for adapting healthcare agents across diverse healthcare settings. We present the first empirical analysis of healthcare agent skills, drawing on 557 healthcare-related skills filtered from 58,159 public skills on ClawHub and annotated along ten dimensions covering function, deployment context, autonomy, and safety. We find that public healthcare skills emphasize patient-facing workflow automation and monitoring rather than the diagnostic and treatment-oriented tasks foregrounded in healthcare-agent research; coverage of the healthcare lifecycle and specialized clinical inputs remains uneven; and general technical risk does not reliably capture clinical risk. These findings position healthcare skills as a procedural layer not yet addressed by current benchmarks and risk frameworks.

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Gelei Xu, Ningzhi Tang, Xueyang Li, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Zhi Zheng, Wei Jin, Yiyu Shi. 2026-05-04. An Empirical Study of Agent Skills for Healthcare: Practice, Gaps, and Governance. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02709

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