Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Layperson Study 1

Cardiac Transplant Disorder Clinical Trial

Official title: Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Layperson Study 1

Status Completed

Clinical Trial Summary

Publicly available outcome assessments for transplant programs do not make salient that some programs tend to reject many of the hearts they are offered, whereas other programs accept a broader range of donor offers. The investigators use empirical studies to test whether transplant center performance data (i.e. transplant and waitlist outcome statistics) that reflect center donor acceptance rates influence laypersons to evaluate centers with high organ decline rates less favorably than centers with low organ decline rates. 1000 lay participants will be recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and randomized to one of five different information presentation conditions. Participants will be given an introduction to the donor organ match process, then asked to view the table of transplant outcomes corresponding to the condition they were randomized to. Each participant is asked to choose between two hospitals: one hospital with an non-selective, "accepting" strategy (takes all donor heart offers), and one hospital with a more selective, "cherrypicking" strategy (tends to reject donor offers that are less than "excellent" quality).

Clinical Trial Description

Publicly available outcome assessments for transplant programs do not make salient that some programs tend to reject many of the hearts they are offered, whereas other programs accept a broader range of donor offers. The investigators use empirical studies to test whether transplant center performance data (i.e. transplant and waitlist outcome statistics) that reflect center donor acceptance rates influence laypersons to evaluate centers with high organ decline rates less favorably than centers with low organ decline rates. 1000 lay participants will be recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and randomized to one of five different information presentation conditions:

1. Condition 1 ("baseline" condition): view only combined transplant survival (e.g. transplant survival rate not stratified by number and quality of donor hearts accepted at each center)

2. Condition 2: view combined transplant survival + total survival (e.g. overall survival rate at each center, computed from survival rates of both transplant and waitlist patients)

3. Condition 3: view only stratified transplant survival (e.g. transplant survival rate stratified into patients who received excellent donor organs and patients who received less than optimal donor organs)

4. Condition 4: view stratified transplant survival + total survival

5. Condition 5: view only total survival

Participants will be given an introduction to the donor organ match process, then asked to view the table of transplant outcomes corresponding to the condition they were randomized to. Each participant is asked to choose between two hospitals: one hospital with an non-selective, "accepting" strategy (takes all donor heart offers), and one hospital with a more selective, "cherrypicking" strategy (tends to reject donor offers that are less than "excellent" quality). In order to identify the decision process that underlies this choice pattern, the investigators will examine a putative mediator. Specifically, participants will be asked to rate the extent to which they considered patients' chances of getting an excellent heart, avoiding a less-than-optimal heart, and getting any type of heart when making their choice between the two hospitals. ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Cardiac Transplant Disorder

• NCT number: NCT04133831
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: Carnegie Mellon University
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: November 15, 2019
• Completion date: April 30, 2020