• Takahiro Suzuki, Hajime Nagasu, Takeshi Ebara, Nobuyuki Kagiyama, Takuya Kishi, Yuichiro Yano, Kazuomi Kario, Akira Nishiyama, Hisatomi Arima, Fujimi Kawai, Shigeru Shibata, Koichi Node, and Atsushi Mizuno.
• Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, St. Luke's International Hospital, Japan.
• Intern. Med. 2024 Dec 5.

AbstractDigital health, which encompasses digital medicine and therapy, integrates advanced technologies across healthcare. Central to this transformation is 'digitization,' which converts continuous analog data into a discrete digital form. However, this process is challenging. First, digitization inherently has the potential to introduce information loss, thereby diminishing the richness and complexity of data. Second, "digit bias," a cognitive distortion, emerges in the interpretation phase, where individuals' perceptions of and reactions to digital data are intrinsically skewed. There exist two major cognitive biases during digitization process: "digit preferences," where healthcare providers prioritize specific numbers, and "left digit bias" where continuous variables are disproportionately estimated by focusing on the leftmost digit. Although information loss and cognitive biases can cause significant distortions in healthcare, the effects of this "digitization" process have not been adequately quantified, and the accumulation of further evidence in this field is anticipated.

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