Effectiveness of neonatal pulse oximetry screening for detection of critical congenital heart disease in daily clinical routine--results from a prospective multicenter study.

Pulse oximetry screening (POS) has been proposed as an effective, noninvasive, inexpensive tool allowing earlier diagnosis of critical congenital heart disease (cCHD). Our aim was to test the hypothesis that POS can reduce the diagnostic gap in cCHD in daily clinical routine in the setting of tertiary, secondary and primary care centres. We conducted a prospective multicenter trial in Saxony, Germany. POS was performed in healthy term and post-term newborns at the age of 24-72 h. If an oxygen saturation (SpO(2)) of