"The Heart is a House": A Heuristic for Generating Cardiac Differential Diagnoses.

backgroundDifferential diagnosis (DDx) is a core clinical reasoning skill that all medical students and physicians must acquire and develop. Metamemory techniques (MMTs), including mnemonic devices and other heuristics, are frequently taught to students as a means of enhancing DDx generation.

methodsIn a 3-hour DDx workshop, second-year medical students were given a brief case vignette of a patient with chest pain and dyspnea and asked to generate initial differential diagnoses before and after learning HIAH. Descriptive statistics and paired T-tests were used to compare the sizes of cardiac-only and total differentials pre-/post-HIAH. Cardiac diagnoses were classified according to the structural categories described by HIAH, and Simpson's Diversity Index (SDI) was used to evaluate the effect of HIAH on the variety of cardiac diagnoses produced.

resultsAll students in the course (

conclusionThe use of HIAH was associated with an increase in the size and variety of cardiac differentials. This increase may have come at the cost of a reduced noncardiac differential. Educators may find HIAH useful for guiding students as they reason through cases involving potential cardiac etiologies. As with all heuristics, care must be exercised to avoid introducing unwanted bias.