Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Layperson Study 1

Completed · Not applicable

Conditions studied: Cardiac Transplant Disorder

In brief

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).

Key facts

Study ID

NCT04133831

Run by

Carnegie Mellon University

People needed

1019

Starts

2019-11-15

Expected to finish

2020-04-30

Last updated by the study team

2026-04-23

Who can join

Age: 18 and older. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may qualify if…

• Participants who are already qualified mTurk workers with Worker Accounts meeting the above criteria 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 live in United States

You may not qualify if…

• Participants on mTurk will not be allowed to participate if they fail to pass the initial "bot screening", a multiple-choice question that asks, "What phone number should you dial when there is an emergency?" The obvious correct response in this screening question is "911", so participants who select one of the incorrect responses (i.e. "1-800-ANTIBOT", "1-877-MTURKER", "123") are filtered out and not allowed to complete the survey.
• Participants on mTurk will be allowed to participate, but excluded from data analysis, if they submit a nonsense response to the free-response question which reads, "In your own words, why do you think patients should choose the hospital you picked?" This question takes place after the participant has viewed the choice stimuli and selected their response. If participants input nonsense in the text response box, they will be permitted to complete the survey and paid, but filtered out from the data analysis.

Where it is running

• Carnegie Mellon University — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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