Despite the recent progress in the field of causal inference, to date there is no agreed upon methodology to glean treatment effect estimation from observational data. The consequence on clinical practice is that, when lacking results from a randomized trial, medical personnel is left without guidance on what seems to be effective in a real-world scenario. This article proposes a pragmatic methodology to obtain preliminary but robust estimation of treatment effect from observational studies, to provide front-line clinicians with a degree of confidence in their treatment strategy. Our study design is applied to an open problem, the estimation of treatment effect of the proning maneuver on COVID-19 Intensive Care patients.

翻译：尽管最近在因果推断领域有所进展,但迄今尚未商定从观察数据中收集治疗效果估计的方法,临床实践的后果是,如果缺乏随机试验的结果,医务人员在现实情景中似乎有效的方面得不到指导,这一条提出了一种务实的方法,从观察研究中获得初步但可靠的治疗效果估计,使一线临床医生对其治疗战略有一定程度的信心。我们的研究设计适用于一个尚未解决的问题,即对COVID-19重症护理病人的推进演习的治疗效果估计。