Nationally, we can expect a near-term shortage of primary care physicians (PCPs) that amounts to an anticipated shortfall of 40,000 PCPs by 2020. The patient experience in the U.S. is clearly set to become a lot less hands-on. For many, technology will close that gap. Technology, after all, can take care of many of the patient’s strictly medical needs: it assists in diagnosis, enables advanced forms of surgery, and optimizes the delivery of care. But a high-touch environment is necessary for promoting healing on a more fundamental level. High-touch health care fosters harmony of the mind, body, and spirit—a harmony that some studies suggest can accelerate the healing process.

Today’s patients are not willing to compromise high touch for high tech—they expect both. The burden of meeting those expectations in the absence of adequate PCP staffing will almost certainly fall to nurses. Nurses who can combine technological knowledge with traditional bedside experience will become even more valuable in this new context.

Merging the worlds
So where are the opportunities for health care professionals to balance high tech with high touch? Here are a few areas where the combination is already making an impact.

1. Transitioning to home-based care
Hospital-based nurses are currently leveraging today’s user-friendly technology platforms to help patients make the transition from the hospital to their home.

This process involves several steps:
• developing an electronic care plan
• obtaining electronic consent from patients
• configuring medical devices for patient monitoring
• assisting patients with the use of medical devices and smart sensors until they are able to utilize them independently
• assigning the patient educational videos
• analyzing each patient’s electronic database on a regular basis.

Nurses who master these technological skills proactively are extremely valuable: they are the model high-tech, high-touch practitioners, and hospitals and providers are rightly creating new high-paying positions to attract qualified people to fill them. Those organizations will be rewarded for attracting and retaining talent in these positions, as they will help implement advanced care interventions and thus reduce patient readmissions.

2. Real-time monitoring of patients
Nurses are already on the front lines of patient care, but they can make even more of an impact when they are empowered to adjust instructions and prescriptions based on real-time monitoring. High-tech, high-touch nurses first need to be certified on the specific EMR system used at the hospital, and must master the patient monitoring platform and its configuration screen. Nurses today regularly use these systems to schedule personalized alert messages and provide specific instructions for patients.

Soon, nurses should be involved in developing a comprehensive care plan for each patient using computer-based tools. More importantly, they must be equipped and trusted to analyze real-time data to detect when something abnormal is happening to the patient. In some instances, nurses could use this system to instruct prescription adjustments— say, when a congestive heart failure patient’s weight exceeds the daily limit.

3. Managing chronic diseases
Chronic disease management is where a high-tech, high-touch approach stands to make the greatest difference. Nurses with chronic disease experience and technological savvy are in high demand. Even health insurance companies are announcing new high-paying positions for nurses who can handle members’ care management using a suite of technology platforms.

Nurses in these positions must:
• learn to effectively identify high-risk patients using advanced analytics platforms
• apply their knowledge of chronic diseases to configure the system, and design a personalized chronic disease management pathway for each high-risk patient
• use smart technologies to alert patients about acute risks (e.g., detecting blood flow in the patient’s legs and informing them of a possible deep vein thrombosis)
• and interpret the data coming from wearable medical technology to educate and coordinate care for patients with chronic diseases. The access to a continuous flow of patient information (high tech) should enable nurses to spend meaningful one-on-one time understanding their patients and building a relationship with them (high-touch).

About the author: Bipin Thomas is a renowned global thought-leader on consumer-centric health care transformation. Thomas is the editorial board member of DOTmed and chairman of ICURO, a consumer-centric digital care outcomes research and management organization, where he is redefining personalized care delivery by connecting all stakeholders in the emerging health care ecosystem. Thomas is a former senior executive at Accenture and UST Global, where he launched strategic digital initiatives across the care continuum including providers, payers, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical and life sciences, federal and state health agenciesb.