Smaller clinical trials for decision making; a case study to show p-values are costly.

Decision makers managing health services are largely invariant to the sample size of the primary trial and the arbitrary p-value of 0.05. If the goal is to make a good decision about whether the intervention should be adopted widely, then that could have been achieved with a much smaller trial. It is plausible that hundreds of millions of research dollars are wasted each year recruiting more participants than required for RCTs.