Electronic fetal heart rate monitoring: research guidelines for interpretation. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Research Planning Workshop.

The purpose of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research planning workshops are to assess the research status of clinically important areas. This article reports on a workshop, whose meetings were held between May 1995 and November 1996, in Bethesda, MD, and Chicago, IL. Its specific purpose was to develop standardized and unambiguous definitions for fetal heart rate (FHR) tracings. Their recommendations for interpreting FHR patterns are being published here, in JOGNN, and simultaneously by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.