NCT04176796

Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Medical Student Study 2

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 105 (actual)
• Sponsor: Carnegie Mellon University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

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. 125 medical student participants will be recruited from University of Pittsburgh Medical School and randomized to one of two 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 the hospital that they would consider to be "higher performing" between two hospitals: one hospital with a 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).

Detailed 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. 125 medical student participants will be recruited from University of Pittsburgh Medical School and randomized to one of two different information presentation conditions: 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) Condition 2: 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) 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 the hospital that they would consider to be "higher performing" between two hospitals: one hospital with a 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.

Conditions

• Cardiac Transplant Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Stratified Transplant Survival	The transplant survival rate in the table of outcome statistics is stratified into two groups: (i) patients who received excellent donor organs and (ii) patients who received less than optimal donor organs. Stratified transplant survival is computed from survival rates of transplant patients who received each quality category of organ. excellent transplant survival = \[number of patients surviving after transplant with excellent organ\]/\[number of patients for whom excellent organ was accepted for transplant\] marginal transplant survival = \[number of patients surviving after transplant with marginal organ\]/\[number of patients for whom marginal organ was accepted for transplant\]

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-11-27
• Primary completion: 2020-03-31
• Completion: 2020-03-31
• First posted: 2019-11-25
• Last updated: 2024-10-29
• Results posted: 2024-10-29

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States