PROVIDENCE – Although nearly 1 million births involve induced labor every year in the United States, no single labor induction regimen is considered superior vis a vis patient experiences, quality outcomes and costs, according to Women & Infants Hospital, a Care New England hospital.
Valery A. Danilack, a research associate in the hospital’s department of obstetrics and gynecology and the Brown University School of Public Health, recently received a five-year, $533,000 Research Scientist Development Award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Her research is entitled “Comparative Effectiveness of Interventions for Labor Induction.”
“My goal is to determine optimal methods of labor induction that minimize harm and maximize benefits while balancing operational cost,” Danila said in the statement of her research: Comparative Effectiveness of Interventions for Labor Induction. “We propose to utilize advanced statistical techniques to study important tradeoffs between the effectiveness, side effects, resource use and patient preferences of interventions used for labor induction.”
The study has three chief goals:
that involve labor induction and survey postpartum patients about the experience, and then analyze the relationship between different labor induction methods and the outcomes for the patients and the hospital;
methods from the perspective of patients and of the hospital.
Danilack, who holds a doctorate in epidemiology, said, “The findings of this research will help inform labor induction policies and clinical guidelines, as well as improve education for patients and providers.”