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).

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 then 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, "cherry-picking" 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.