Clinical Research Directory

Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Clinician Study 3

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 heart transplant clinical personnel will be recruited from International Heart and Lung Society (ISHLT) and the Pediatric Heart Transplant Society (PHTS) and randomized to one of two different information presentation conditions. Participants will be 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).

Diagnostic and Therapeutic Applications of Microarrays in Heart Transplantation

Demonstrate the impact of the Molecular Microscope Diagnostic System as the standard of care for heart transplant patients.