Last week we noted that Massachusetts General Hospital had tapped Voalte to distribute iPhones to its nurses. This week the New York Times also published a feature on how smartphones have become increasingly essential tools for students at nursing schools. The Times discussed the trend with a handful of professors and students at nursing schools across the country.

This crucial quote from the Times report sums up the trend best: "But the most profound recent change is a move away from the profession’s dependence on committing vast amounts of information to memory. It is not that nurses need to know less, educators say, but that the amount of essential data has exploded," Time reporter Richard Perez-Pena wrote.

Joann Eland, an associate professor at University of Iowa's nursing school told the Times that there are too many drugs, interactions, and tests for students to commit to memory and that's what has driven the uptick in adoption of smartphones among nurses and nursing school programs.

“We have a certain set of apps that we want nursing students to have on their handheld devices — a book of lab tests, a database of drugs, even nursing textbooks,” Helen Connors, executive director of the Kansas University Center for Health Informatics told the NYTimes.

Read more in the New York Times here.