Cognitive debiasing through sparklines in clinical data displays.

Sparklines, embedded contextual information graphics, can help reduce diagnostic errors by highlighting trends in data, simplifying cognitive tasks and providing context for decision making. Examples applied to heparin induced thrombocytopenia, cardiac catheterization and pediatric viral illness illustrate the concept. Sparklines are ideal in situations where the limited textual data representations obfuscate interpretation, the graphic aids interpretation of the data, or the graphic guides decision making.