Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Patient Study 4

Carnegie Mellon University94 enrolled

Overview

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.

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

SINGLE

Enrollment

Conditions

Cardiac Transplant Disorder

Interventions

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 FormatOTHER

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.

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: Participants will be asked to participate if they confirm the following inclusion criteria in the consent form. 1. 18 years of age or older 2. must read and understand the information in the consent form 3. must want to participate in the research and continue with the survey 4. 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.

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Hospital Choice

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.

Time frame: 1 day

Secondary Outcomes

Mediator of Hospital Choice

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.