German regional variation of acute and high oral corticosteroid use for asthma.

Objective: To improve understanding of real-world asthma treatment and inform physician education, we evaluated regional variation in asthma prevalence and oral corticosteroid (OCS) use across Germany.

Methods: We developed a machine learning gradient-boosted tree model with IMS® Disease Analyzer electronic medical records, which cover 3% of German patients. This model had a 91% accuracy in predicting the presence of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.