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

NCT04176796 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 105

Last updated 2026-04-23

Study results available
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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).

Conditions

  • Cardiac Transplant Disorder

Interventions

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 = \[number of patients surviving after transplant with marginal organ\]/\[number of patients for whom marginal organ was accepted for transplant\]

Sponsors & Collaborators

Principal Investigators

  • Alison E Butler, BS · Carnegie Mellon University

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH
Masking
SINGLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2019-11-27
Primary Completion
2020-03-31
Completion
2020-03-31

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Entities

Companies

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04176796 on ClinicalTrials.gov