Copyright © Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. Standards for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring clinical reporting in daily practice: recommendations from the Italian Society of Hypertension Stefano Omboni a , Paolo Palatini b and Gianfranco Parati c,d ;on behalf of the Working Group on Blood Pressure Monitoring of the Italian Society of Hypertension This paper aims to provide practical indications to healthcare professionals and manufacturers of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) devices on the characteristics and minimum required contents of a standard ABPM report to be used in the clinical practice. Such indications will help make ABPM reports more easily interpretable and independent from the ABPM device and software used. The first important and unavoidable step of ABPM reporting is a quality assessment: if a recording does not meet the minimum requirements for quality criteria, the reporting physician should advise the patient to repeat the test and should not further proceed to a diagnostic evaluation and interpretation of the recording. A basic clinical report must contain the list of each single reading, the graphical display of individual readings and hourly average values, the mean, minimum and maximum values, and SDs of blood pressure and heart rate values for the 24 h, daytime and night-time, day–night differences, and blood pressure loads. The final medical report should be prepared in a quite logically structured way, considering the following: (i) a judgment on the overall quality of the 24 h recording; (ii) an indication of whether average 24 h, daytime and night-time systolic, and diastolic blood pressure values are within or above the normal limits; and (iii) a description of the 24 h pattern of blood pressure fluctuations. A final general statement on the normotensive or hypertensive status and on the degree of blood pressure control in case of treated patients should also be provided. Blood Press Monit 00:000–000 Copyright © 2015 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved. Blood Pressure Monitoring 2015, 00:000–000 Keywords: ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, clinical report, guidelines a Clinical Research Unit, Italian Institute of Telemedicine, Varese, b Department of Medicine, University of Padua, Padua, c Department of Health Sciences, University of Milano-Bicocca and d Department of Cardiovascular, Neural and Metabolic Sciences, Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Milan, Italy Correspondence to Stefano Omboni, MD, Clinical Research Unit, Italian Institute of Telemedicine, Via Colombera 29, 21048 Solbiate Arno, Varese, Italy Tel: + 39 0331 984529; fax: + 39 0331 984530; e-mail: stefano.omboni@iitelemed.org Received 21 February 2015 Revised 24 April 2015 Accepted 1 May 2015 Introduction Considerable clinically useful information can be obtained by analyzing 24 h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM), with a number of different para- meters being provided by currently available software tools [1]. Consequently, the practicing physician is often faced with bewildering reports consisting of reams of paper that contain plots, histograms, and results of data analysis that may have little relevance for clinical practice [2], and that are presented and summarized in a different manner by different data analysis programs, coupled with the different ABPM devices on the market. This is not likely to help physicians in extracting the most relevant information out of a 24 h ABPM recording, and may rather be responsible for some confusion in data inter- pretation when using different devices. Indeed, in a busy general practice, a simpler presentation of only basic data summarized in a one-page report may be enough for diagnostic purposes, as suggested in the recent 2013 European Society of Hypertension ABPM position paper, whereas for research purposes, a larger number of statistical details on the features of 24 h profile as well as other indices may be required [3–5]. Current guidelines [4,5] describe the procedure for a correct performance of 24 h ABPM recordings and sum- marize clinical indications and perspectives for future applications. However, such documents do not refer in detail to the practical aspect of ABPM reporting as they provide only vague suggestions in this respect. For this reason, in this document, we aimed to provide practical indications for physicians, healthcare profes- sionals, and manufacturers of ABPM devices on the char- acteristics and minimum required contents of a standard ABPM report to be used in the clinical practice for routine diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Hopefully, such indications will facilitate standardization of ABPM report- ing by device manufacturers, making presentation of data more easily interpretable and independent from the ABPM device and software used. Quality assessment of the ABPM recording The first important and unavoidable step when approach- ing ABPM data reporting is a quality assessment of the recording. As for every diagnostic procedure, a 24 h ABPM tracing that does not comply with basic quality criteria Review article 1 1359-5237 Copyright © 2015 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1097/MBP.0000000000000135