Case Study: Large Healthcare Company identifies excessive oral corticosteroid use in asthma patients with IQVIA Patient Finder

Identifying Asthma Patients with Oral Corticosteroid Use

Large Healthcare Company needed to find and prioritize asthma patients receiving frequent oral corticosteroids (OCS)—a practice linked to serious short- and long-term side effects and highlighted by 2020 severe asthma guidelines that call for reduced OCS use and active monitoring. The organization partnered with IQVIA and used IQVIA’s Patient Finder to address visibility gaps in electronic patient records and surface uncontrolled asthma patients who might benefit from specialist review.

IQVIA deployed Patient Finder’s NLP-driven searches across full patient records to produce validated lists that were more comprehensive than manual searches, with reported time savings up to 85%. The solution helped identify previously unrecognized patients (about 3% of severe asthma patients in several centers), flagged that 7.2% of asthma patients were over-prescribed OCS and 40.3% had no specialist contact, and enabled prioritization by OCS dose and escalation—improving efficiency, guideline compliance, and the potential to reduce OCS-related harms and costs.