Active Management Of Risk In Pregnancy At Term - a Prospective Study

The study will include patients who have their prenatal care at the Paley clinic in AEMC, where the residents provide the prenatal care with supervision of OBGYN attending physicians, or at other affiliated clinics that are staffed by care givers from our OBGYN department.

Patients at our obstetric clinics are scheduled for weekly visits starting at 36 weeks. At 36 to 37 weeks of gestation, or earlier, each patient will be offered to participate in the study. Those who refuse will continue to have the standard care and will not be considered as part of the study. Those who wish to participate in the study will be consented and will then be randomly assigned to the control group or to the AMOR-IPAT group with a ratio of 2:1.

Risk factors will be identified for each patient participating in the study at the gestational age of 36 to 37 weeks (using the digichart system, the medical records and questioners) and the upper limit of the optimal time of delivery will be calculated for each patient, according to the method used by the UPenn group, with the time always being at least 38 weeks and no more then 41 weeks.

Patients from the AMOR-IPAT group will be scheduled for induction of labor on the morning of the day of the calculated upper limit (plus or minus 2 days).

To try and eliminate biases, a uniform method of induction will be applied to all the patients participating in the study, no matter the group or the reason for the induction. The induction will be performed with misoprostol 25mcg intravaginally every four hours (to a maximum of three doses) for a Bishop score of 4 or less and as long as there is no tachysystole which will be defined as six or more uterine contractions in ten minutes in consecutive ten minute intervals. The misoprostol will be followed by a foley bulb inflated with 80 cc of fluid if the cervix is still not favorable after three doses or when tachysystole develops. Once the cervix is favorable induction will be continued with high dose oxytocin (starting dose of six milliunits with increments of four milliunits every thirty minutes), which is associated with less cesarean deliveries for dystocia than the low dose.