Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Patient Study 4

This empirical study tests whether transplant center performance data that reflect center donor acceptance rates influence patients and their family members to evaluate centers with high organ decline rates less favorably than centers with low organ decline rates. 400 transplant patients and family members will be recruited from transplant support group social media websites and randomized to one of four different information presentation conditions. Upon viewing a pair of outcome tables corresponding to their condition, the participants are asked to choose which hospital is higher performing (one hospital with a non-selective "accepting" strategy and one hospital with a more selective "cherrypicking" strategy.

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Key information

Conditions

Cardiac Transplant Disorder

Age range

18 year and older

Sex eligibility

All sexes

Study type

Interventional

Phase

Not applicable

Primary location

Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15213, United States

Who can participate

Healthy volunteers accepted: Yes

Only the study team can determine whether someone qualifies for participation.

Inclusion criteria

Participants will be asked to participate if they confirm the following inclusion criteria in the consent form.

18 years of age or older
must read and understand the information in the consent form
must want to participate in the research and continue with the survey
must be a pre- or post-transplant patient or family member of the transplant patient

Exclusion criteria

Participants who do not meet the primary criterion of being a pre- or post-transplant patient or family member of the transplant patient.

Treatment and study plan

Stratified Transplant Survival Metric

Other

Both transplant metric conditions display the number of hearts offered to each center, the number of hearts accepted by each center, and the number of transplants performed at each center (in a year), in addition to the condition-specific metrics below. The stratified condition instead features a pair of values corresponding to each center's offers/acceptances/transplant survival rates for donor hearts of "optimal" or "adequate" quality.

SRTR Information Format

Other

The information format varies based on how the transplant hospital statistics are organized when presented to participants on the choice screen. The SRTR conditions mimic the information format present on the SRTR public reporting website.

Primary outcomes

Hospital Choice

Time frame: 1 day

The outcome variable will be a measure of binary choice between two hospitals: one with a selective donor-heart acceptance strategy and one with a non-selective donor heart acceptance strategy.

Participants will respond to the question "Which Hospital is higher performing? Please click on one of the two tables below to indicate which hospital is the better choice." Participants will choose been two outcome tables featuring the selective and non-selective hospital (counterbalanced, such that each of the two choices is equally likely to be presented at top of the choice scenario in each condition). The number of participants that choose each hospital will be the measured outcome variable used in analyses.

Secondary outcomes

Mediator of Hospital Choice

Time frame: 1 day

On the next page of the survey, participants will respond to three mediator questions: "There are many reasons why one transplant hospital might outperform another. Which reasons were most important in your decision? Please move the slider to indicate how much you considered each of the reasons below (0=reason was not important, 100=reason was extremely important)."

Participants will then move a slider bar (0-100) to indicate the importance of the following three items:

Patients were more likely to receive an excellent donor heart at the hospital I picked.

Patients were less likely to receive a marginal donor heart at the hospital I picked.

Patients were more likely to receive any kind of heart at the hospital I picked.

The third item (more likely to receive any kind of heart) will be the only variable that is included in the planned mediation analysis.

Sponsors and collaborators

Lead sponsor

Carnegie Mellon University

Other

Registry information

Important dates

Study start: 2021
Primary completion: 2023
Study completion: 2023
First posted: Mar 22, 2021
Registry last updated: Feb 14, 2024

OpenTrials presents study information sourced from ClinicalTrials.gov. The official registry record should be consulted for the latest information.

View the official ClinicalTrials.gov record (opens in a new tab)

This listing is for discovery and informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, does not guarantee that a study is recruiting, and does not determine eligibility. Contact the study team and a qualified healthcare professional when considering participation.

Published trials that share one or more normalized conditions with this study.

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