Assessing Heuristic Bias During Care for Patients Hospitalized for Heart Failure: Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure

Heuristic biases are increasingly recognized, and potentially modifiable, contributors to patient care and outcomes. Left digit bias is a cognitive bias where continuous variables are categorized by their left-most digit. The impact of this heuristic bias applied to patient age on the quality of care in heart failure has not been explored. In a large registry of patients hospitalized for heart failure, the study did not detect a left digit bias‚ concerning the age at discharge, which resulted in the differential quality of care or outcomes.