Clinical-Pharmacological Drug Information Center of Hannover Medical School: Update From a Tertiary Care University...

Drug information centers (DICs) are institutions dedicated to providing independent and up-to-date information on medications and their usage to healthcare professionals. Here, we provide an update from the clinical-pharmacological DIC of Hannover Medical School, covering the period from April 2022 to December 2024. In total, 438 queries were evaluated. Potential differences between patient-specific and general queries were analyzed with Pearson's chi-squared test or Fisher's exact test. The Holm-Bonferroni method was applied to counteract the problem of multiple comparisons. A curated selection of ten clinically interesting and educational queries is presented and discussed. 85.2% of the queries were patient-specific, and 95.7% were submitted by physicians, predominantly internists, psychiatrists, and surgeons. Indications/contraindications, adverse drug reactions, and pharmacodynamic interactions (PDIs) represented the three most frequent query categories. Compared to our previous research, we observed increases in queries about pharmacotherapy in advanced age and drug use during pregnancy or breastfeeding. As compared to general queries, patient-specific queries were significantly more often related to indications/contraindications (26.2% vs. 49.6%; p < 0.001) and PDIs (24.6% vs. 44.5%, p = 0.003) after adjusting for multiple comparisons. The query characteristics remained relatively stable between our previous investigation and the current analysis (2022-2024), in particular with respect to type of queries, profession of inquiring healthcare professionals, medical specialties of inquirers, and query categories. Changes mainly pertained to higher proportions of queries about pharmacotherapy in advanced age and drug use during pregnancy or breastfeeding.