Nurses' use of Calculators and its Foreshadowing for Artificial Intelligence
How many of you rely on a calculator today for nursing practice?
I remember my calculator was a necessity for me each time I was preparing a pediatric medication during my years in direct care. I took care of hospitalized children and each medication was weight based dosing. The calculator, in partnership with my Lexi Comp pediatric dosing guide, were essentials for me. I could not function without those items. I also needed my stethoscope and pen to be an effective nurse.
While I began my RN journey in 2000, just a decade earlier there were articles published that were investigating whether nurses should be using calculators or not in practice. One article entitled, "Should Nurses Carry Calculators?" (from conference proceedings in 1998), investigated the role of calculators for nursing care delivery.
The abstract starts with these two sentences, "It has been a widespread tradition of nurse education establishments to forbid the use of hand-held calculators in examinations of mathematical skills...The rationale behind this was that calculators were not freely available in the clinical areas where these mathematical skills would be put to the ultimate test and where accuracy in calculating was obviously vitally important".
The article goes on to describe the authors' evaluation of nurses' use of calculators in clinical care. The conclusion offers some specificity as to which clinical areas nurses would benefit from calculators over others. Pediatric and overall new graduate nurses may see greater benefit from the calculator use where there is weight based dosing over behavioral health and adult care areas.
Where this becomes important in the face of artificial intelligence is in recognizing there are opportunities where technology has the potential to augment nursing care for the better.
Artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as "AI", can be defined as comprising of technologies that can do tasks that previously required a human brain, or a brain and body in combination.
In my 20+ years in health IT, this is the first time I have seen nurses' of all types of roles be cautiously optimistic while also concerned about the potential for AI in nursing and healthcare. This is a good place for us to be. One should be cautious and optimistic toward any new technology. It is people who help make the technology's development and use an effective (or ineffective) reality for care.
So, in the same way that calculators were of concern for nursing use in the 1990's, we see AI serving in that concerned role of nurses here as we approach 2025 and beyond.
We will get there together but will need to be active participants in the process.
Sincerely,
~ Tiffany Kelley
Tiffany Kelley PhD MBA RN NI-BC FNAP
Founder & CEO
iCare Nursing Solutions