Principled Subpopulation Analysis of the BetterBirth Study and the Impact of WHO's Safe Childbirth Checklist Intervention

The World Health Organization (WHO) developed the Safe Childbirth Checklist as an intervention to improve care and outcomes in maternal and newborn health. The original study reported that the intervention did not significantly improve the outcomes. In this work, we employ a principled data-driven analysis to identify subpopulations with divergent characteristics: 1) vulnerable subgroups with the highest risk of neonatal deaths and 2) subgroups in the intervention arm that benefited from the Checklist intervention with significantly reduced risks of deaths and complications. Results demonstrate that low birth weight represented the most vulnerable group, whereas mother-baby dyads described by normal gestational age at birth, known parity, and unknown number of abortions was found to benefit from the Checklist intervention (OR : 0.70, 95%CI : 0.62-0.79, p < 0.001). Generally, the flexibility of our approach helps to answer subgroup-based queries in the broader global health domain, which also provides further insights to domain experts.