Clinical pharmacology in everyday clinical care.

Since direct patient care is only one of the many fields of clinical pharmacologists world wide, the contribution of the discipline to the provision of healthcare is frequently underestimated. Besides therapeutic monitoring and pharmacogenetic services, particularly drug information services run by clinical pharmacology departments have been established in many countries. Despite the fact that electronic prescribing support may prevent physicians from major medication errors due to drug-drug interactions and inadequate dosages, a substantial number of questions addressed to drug information services include clinical expertise and judgement. Furthermore, a high number of requests deal with adverse drug interactions and involve requests for alternative drugs in the individual clinical context. Using information technology, an international web-based clinical pharmacology service using existing knowledge databases seems to be a promising option to demonstrate the excellence of the discipline.