Yes, say UAB researcher Dwight Rouse and Lister Hill Center Scholars Robert Goldenberg, Stephen Mennemeyer, Crayton Fargason and their colleagues. For those clinical problems which are too complex for intuitive decision making , they show how decision analysis can systematically compare different approaches. The authors applied decision analysis to a common treatment decision during childbirth and found that the strategy endorsed by two American Academy of Pediatrics committees is among the least effective and the most costly of the nineteen options studied. The most common form of early infection in newborns is due to group B streptococcus acquired during delivery from the infected mother.
Prevention depends on giving in infected mother an antibiotic at the time of delivery.
Unfortunately, there is no rapid and reliable test to determine, who is infected. Also, not all women who are infected at the time of birth pass the infection to their newborns. Decision analysis estimates the probability of each event that is important to deciding how to treat the mother. For example, the researcher first estimates the probability that the mother is infected and then the probability that she will pass the infection on to her baby. These calculations are complicated because the more rapid tests for infection are not perfectly accurate and some highly accurate tests take days to produce a result.